These queries are pretty huge. Trying to unpack it all will take a lot of time. I'll focus on one thing. Both plans are timing out in the optimizer. Timeouts...

Linked servers are, unfortunately, a very widely used practice. They're not a very widely recommended practice because of all the issues that they cause. However, they're so very convenient, making...

Which, it's worth noting, will rollback open transactions. Not the end of the world or anything, but worth noting.

One additional point, lots of people talk about avoiding the nightmare scenarios of missing DBAs, etc., I joined my last company after an interview where the interviewer asked me what...

That's a decent list. You may not be able to ask all of them, but it's good to have a plan.

I'd ask about RTO & RPO, what they...

Yes. Absolutely. An application login using AD is correct. Further, that login should not be 'sa' on the server. It also shouldn't even be 'dbo' on the database. However, all...

Paul is one of the greatest. You'll probably never go wrong reading his stuff and following his advice.

The difference is in the amount of data being accessed. The...

It's SQL Server. Every security setting you would use to ensure proper protection of the system is the same when dealing with web pages as when dealing with traditional client...

One scans everything. The other only looks at the root page. Of course the results will be different. Read the documentation for more details.

Without seeing the query and the execution plan, I have nothing to offer you except the link below to my books on query performance tuning and reading execution plans.

Don't mind wading in here even though I work for Redgate.

You'll want to focus on two things when you're evaluating the tool (from a tech perspective). Does it...

Well no. If you assign ownership to a login and that login goes away, it could cause issues. You can control the security so that people can only access a...

The dbo is generally considered to be the 'sa' of the database. Just as 'sa' can access the whole server, 'dbo' can access the whole database. Generally speaking, this is...

Choosing to compound keys is something you can do for performance because of how the keys are stored or because of how the tables are accessed. It's not necessarily bad...