Good point. I'll see what I can do.

Make sure you turn on blocked process report in Extended Events. It'll be a lot easier to KNOW what's going on rather than relying on some random people on...

It's not traditional ghost rows. Those are from a simple delete and you'd never see what you're seeing (I stand by my very first post in this thread on that...

You didn't indicate schema in your pseudocode. Did you use schema name in your query? (Recommend you always do to avoid ambiguity) Any tables, views, or synonyms w/ the...

Also, the code didn't include the clustered index that is clearly there in the plan and the picture of the table.

Ah, so RCSI and Availability Groups. That changes things.

So, yeah, what's happening is, because you have RCSI, it has to keep those version records. Normally, those get cleaned up, but,...

If there are 50k reads, there's some data somewhere. Without seeing the query, your structures, the execution plan, nothing but the version of SQL Server, which, sorry, communicates just almost...

I have a magic phrase I've memorized and you can have it too.

"I don't know, but here's how I'd find the answer..."

Now, you have to have a plan for finding...

Just guessing here, but if the data was ordered first, so that you're doing your batches in the same order that the data is already stored in, you'll likely see...

Piling on a little. It's truly dependent on the load of the system, data size, number of transactions, transaction size, database design, statistics, indexes, code, code, code, system settings, version,...

They will tell you right up front if you have to pay for anything, and what that cost is. Just go straight to the source.

In addition to @Ant-Green's excellent answer, after you get the backups working, practice doing restores. Do a full restore, then do point in time restores with the logs. Make sure...

Again, we're talking theoretical. I don't have a specific answer I can give you on this question. Either could work. Either could work well. Testing is your best friend. This...

I very much agree with the answers you've already received. SQL isn't meant to be a "looping" language. It's designed to work on the concepts of sets. Yes, there are...

Really sounds like you may have the database in FULL recovery, but you're not running log backups. Just guessing, but from what you've posted, seems likely. However, if you answer...