The one thing to keep in mind when setting up any backup plan is the restore process. Because, after all, the backup is not the most important part, the restore...

Since you're seeing intermittent behavior, I would suggest looking for resource contention and blocking. Next time it's running slow, run a query against sys.dm_exec_requests to see what the process is...

And the indexes have to be selective enough to be useful for a seek or you'll get scans. Same things apply to non-clustered indexes too.

For lots more detail on query...

Once. Had an app that was freaked that they were going to run out of numbers so we seeded them to max negative value so that they could increment all...

I wasn't aware that SQL Server on it's own EVER sent anything to the DBA proactively. All monitoring has to be built or bought.

I've built my own monitoring system several times. I wrote it all down in Chapters 2 & 3 of my book. I use a combination of performance monitor, SQL Server's...

You would already have to have in place auditing. Capturing RPC Starting from Extended Events or Trace Events and then comparing that to RPC Complete will let you know when...

Yes & no. It just stops allowing writes. You get errors. Reads work fine. All writes stop because there's nowhere for them to go.

It's not a question of which tables are accessed. It's a question of the queries being run against the indexes and statistics in support of those queries. Instead of looking...

Your choices are pretty limited. You can remove data and then shrink the database. You can use storage compression if you're using Enterprise in SQL Server. You can look at...

ChrisM@Work (11/29/2012)

This gets my vote,...

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...