The DTA works off of estimations in the optimizer. It can't measure actual performance improvements, let alone provide you with a projected report of them. Instead, it's basing it's recommendations...

It sure sounds like direct intervention by a person. However, do you have a monitoring tool of some kind that has the capacity to interfere with long running jobs?

You're not saying which cloud environment you're looking at. Let's say it's Azure. Then, yes, there is absolutely a way to "clone" the environment using ARM Templates. To learn about...

Ah, looked at the code. the ISNULL function in the JOIN criteria is going to result in no statistics being used on the column. Pre-2014 cardinality estimation will be one...

Estimated rows may be 1, but how many estimated executions? The two combine frequently depending on the other operators in the plan.

It's an 8gb server running two instances at the same time, one production and the other test and you're worried that the test instances, and only the test instance, is...

Test the restore process regularly. That's the best thing to do for any backup. I also like the idea of adding a mid-day diff. Test that too though. And test...