I would change it immediately after installing SQL Server. The default value is just ridiculously low.

Good answer, but that's not even "from SSMS" That's Agent using PowerShell. There's no way I know of through SSMS directly. You'd have to do some command line magic of...

No, it's not a good idea to change it at the server level. Most of the time you get parallelism on queries that are not complex enough to justify it....

Oh, nice catch, I didn't see that.

Still look at the execution plan. It's a foundational start to everything you do when trying to tune performance problems on queries.

However, I'm still...

Ed Wagner (1/6/2014)

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I think I'd have to vote for the 270-column table where the upload is not working properly. It made me...

All you did by detaching the database was flush queries out of the cache (and probably flushed data out of the cache too). That's not a solution. Instead, you need...

It could be process, your server set-up or your code. Most of the time, it's the code. I've got a book on SQL query tuning that walks you through gathering...

Ed Wagner (1/6/2014)

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Well, we got hit pretty hard by the recent storm just north of Detroit. I've got over a foot in my driveway now and it was cleared...

The code looks to me like it will be likely to use that index. Have you checked the execution plan to see what it is doing?

What changed on the machine? It's unlikely that the server instance just suddenly decided to stop working. Surely something lead to the initial problem. I'd look there to figure out...

If the process you're currently using has a command line, try using PowerShell. You can fire a powershell command right from SQL Agent.

Not a problem.

Just so you know, I cheated in figuring out what was up. I used Red Gate SQL Prompt. It's a software my company makes. It's invaluable when working...

You were missing a parenthesis after the first date operation. You don't need all those parentheses. You can have it just like this:

SELECT [displaydate],

...

The first query is an old style ANSI 89 syntax join with the join criteria in the WHERE clause. The second is a modern style join with the join criteria...

Since you know the specific query, your job got easier. You want to look at the code to ensure it's not using functions on columns in the WHERE clause or...