You're going to learn different things in different places. Small companies will give you a lot more breadth of knowledge because you won't be able to specialize in any one...

Yeah, I haven't seen corrupt stats, so I'm curious how they evidence as well.

Without the code and structures it's hard to know, but based on what you described, it sure sounds like all you need is a simple join to bring back the...

Unless there's something you're not listing here, there's no reason to go with temp tables in the query you've shown.

Just piling on to this one to reinforce the message.

Exactly! I regularly have to remind our...

Your choices are limited. Add a file to the filegroup that's on another drive, or remove things from the existing file group. That's it.

If you don't have monitoring in place...

Interesting question. I don't think that you can. If you look at the events that capture any form of execution plan, none of them allow for the duration column, so...

Unless you get incredibly sophisticated with your search algorithms, possibly using CLR or something, to determine if the string you're looking at is contained within a comment, of either type,...

I agree, more often than not cursors are the wrong approach to take when dealing with data.

Just so you can figure out what's happening though, elminate the cursor from the...

No, there's no real way to link TSQL and Management Studio. Management Studio uses TSQL, it's not used by TSQL, so statements issued in TSQL won't affect SSMS. To modify...

There are several queries in this MSDN entry that might help you figure out exactly what you need.

I would cap it too. Exact numbers are hard to come by because it's so dependent on the OS, what you're doing within SQL Server, etc., but I'd say, for...

I guess the thing to understand is what tempdb is used for. That'll help you and your developers understand whether or not it's a bottle neck.

Every temporary table, obviously,...

Some other thoughts, you're trying to find the average number of days but you're returning 146,000 rows. Do you really need that much data? Reducing the amount moved around can...

What you might be seeing is termed a regression by the optimizer team. They fight those tooth & nail, but sometimes they occur. Usually, but not always, you're doing something...