And make sure you do some test restores to ensure you can get your database back and that you know how to use the log backups that you're taking.

Just make sure you set the maximum memory size within the SQL Server instance and then, as stated, let SQL Server do the memory management for you. For your memory...

What is it that you're trying to do?

You can, but it's not at all the same partitioning mechanisms available in the earthed product. Here's some sample code on how to set it up from Microsoft. Here's a...

You could probably pay Gartner or one of their equivalents. I've no doubt they have that sort of information available. But I'm not aware of it being published anywhere.

Effectively, the use of an index in the ON clause is the same as the use of an index in the WHERE clause. The criteria can act as a filter...

And compare execution times and reads.

But I would suspect they'll resolve out to the same plan during the simplification phase.

Glad to hear you worked it out, and thanks for posting the answer too. Now when someone who has the same problem does a search, they'll know what the solution...

Red Gate tools (and that was for 11 years before I started to work for them). Other than that, paid tools kind of depends on what you're doing. Monitoring, I'd...

Without knowing the software better, I'm not sure what you're referencing. It's possible that the inserts of data from the first server is causing blocking and/or resource contention for the...

To really help out, the execution plan and the query would be best.

The licensing costs between 2012 & 2014 are not severe such as they are between 2012/2014 and all the rest of the older versions of SQL Server. With that in...

To summarize the rest of the answers:

It depends.

Menu:

Tools, Options, Query Results, SQL Server.

There's an option in the very first drop down...

Oh, and for a more sophisticated look at index & stats maintenance, I'd suggest you track down the Midnight DBA scripts for Minion. They've put a lot of thought into...