You're measuring the length of the expression, not it's internal storage structures. So that's why it shows as 5.

Nope. You can go and install it on a 16 core server. But, when Microsoft comes along with an audit, your company will pay one heck of a lot more...

Nothing you have to do to the installation. You've paid for your license, install the product and go to work.

Benki Chendu (1/12/2015)

ok...Would I be able to...

Yes. They could be. As I said, putting activity monitoring through trace or extended events will let you know what they're doing.

Make sure you have backups in place and that you've tested them by running a restore prior to starting this process.

I'm not aware of a process that will tell you what changed a specific page on the database. I think you're just going to have to go with standard activity...

Yeah, tuning the queries so that they run correctly is always a good option.

Then the implication is that you have some process or other that's hitting 400 of the 500gb worth of pages on your database. Is there a nightly load or some...

Are you initializing each backup file or are you stacking them together into a single file?

You should take a look at the Resource Governor.

Functions on columns like this are going to lead to scans on your indexes

and iif((@StartDate = '1900-01-01' or @EndDate = '1900-01-01'), '1900-01-01',PO.CalendarDate)

...

The amount of time it takes is completely dependent on the size of the index in combination with the ability to get access to resources. At 1.5tb, it's going to...

100% agreement with all that Jeff said.

One question. If you're not doing differential backups, is it any big deal that they have an extra full backup going on?

You may also see this if the extension is different. It's one of the many reasons I prefer using scripts for restore anyway. The GUI is limiting and difficult.