It's possible. Once you're in a VM, you can't trust those numbers. However, I'd check to see that you have Max memory set appropriately so that it is using what...

Yep. Looked at the first plan NO_INTO, and it's a timeout from the optimizer. That means, even the "good" plan is not necessarily an adequate plan. But that does explain...

Check this, look at the properties of the SELECT operator for all the plans you have. Considering the complexity of what you're doing, I suspect you'll see that the reason...

Pretty sure it updates the physical storage and then the indexes... except where the index is a clustered index, which you didn't mention. Then, the index is the physical storage...

I have yet to see a third party tool that makes good recommendations for what to do about poor query performance. You can get some generic checks on the low-hanging...

Personally, unrestricted with lots and lots and lots of monitoring and alerts in place so that I can try to prevent the disks from filling up. Either approach has downsides....

You can query the Dynamic Management Objects for this information. sys.dm_exec_query_stats will show you which queries, currently in cache, are using the most ram, cpu & disk. You can combine...

Just remember, SQLIO is a stress test tool. If you're talking about validating your production system, you will be applying a load to your disks that is very likely to...

Thinking about it some more, take a look at sys.dm_os_wait_stats. That's going to tell you, in aggregate, what is causing your system to run slow. That will indicate where the...

If you're looking at disk problems, for once, you can leave the VM guy alone and concentrate on the physical box. You may need to wake up the SAN guy...

Millions of rows are not necessarily a problem. It really depends on your indexes and statistics. If you have something like an identity column as the primary key, then you...

When you add something like GROUP BY, the plan is not the same because the processing is not the same. You can't apply a simple SELECT (or even a very...

Nope. Those are different pieces of functionality inherent to the different versions of SQL Server. If there's 2008 functionality needed, it's also going to need the underlying 2008 engines.

There is not a single spot that says "SHOWPLAN Enhancement for 2012". All through the book there are additional pieces of knowledge as they are applicable.

There are few changes in...

There is no way. Sorry.

If it's a dev environment, you may not want to set up extensive backup routines (for many obvious reasons) which is yet another reason to have...