There's no instant or magic way to build this kind of knowledge. It takes a long time. I'd add getting a copy of the book T-SQL Querying Fundamentals by Itzik...

Side-by-side is absolutely the best and safest. I've never really seen any major issues during upgrades, but if you had any, the ability to instantly just bring the old server...

I freely admit to my bias, but yeah, I think you can get Visual Studio to work very well. You have to plan to put the pre/post deployment scripts to...

How long does it take to rebuild your indexes. You would at least want to get a log backup at the beginning and end of that process (no, I'm not...

Might want to check the power settings on the server. That's been hitting a lot of people lately and it will certainly have some of the effects you're outlining here.

If...

Replication is one option. Replication is a bit of a bear to maintain though. You could also look to log shipping, although that has some shortcomings too.

GilaMonster (8/22/2014)

That's exactly what it's doing....

Red Gate SQL Prompt will do that.

I don't disagree with the other points, but I'm with you, if you're not using that index, it's a waste. You only get one clustered index. Rather than just arbitrarily...

It's a little outdated, but I wrote the source control chapters on this book on Team Development. It covers some of what you're looking for. Also, my company, Red Gate...

Do you have enforced referential constraints on the columns you're joining on? Does the data accurately map between the two tables, or is it possible that you're getting multiple matches...

No, you can't insert data into a table without some locking being applied. That's all part of the ACID properties of a relational database. You can look at trying out...

It sounds like bad parameter sniffing. What's likely happening is that a query is getting an execution plan that doesn't work well for most data sets, that's causing issues, you...

You can use the transaction log backups from log shipping in a recovery scenario.

I hadn't heard, but now that I know... I'm bummed. They made the show really fun.