getting back to the original topic - are the posted questions getting worse.?

hell yes...there was one today that was "I have query, make it faster"  - several of us very...

is it possible that by creating the index it altered the stats (or created new stats) and that's why you got the new plan?

you have to give us more, even just the query definition

we can't help you unless you share a bit more information

also have a look at using sp_updatestats

if your stats are out of date then you will have bad plans... but with only 61 thousand records i'm not banking on the...

ok - nchar to store  datetimes? and nchar to store durations (with leading zeros)

why not convert the fields to datetime and int - then use dateadd or datediff to fix...

one thing i'd  add to john's very valid points... do you start getting results immediately, but it takes 20 seconds to complete? or does it take 20 seconds and you...

That's what I'd like to see implemented in SQL Server, and Windows/Linux, for that matter. Maybe with a group of 3-5 people, of which 2 have to approve something....

ok - so 8GB and 4Gb assigned, no wonder your PLE is 300 seconds. get someone to upgrade the memory.

I'd just dump the monitoring solution, it's negatively affecting production... look...

just make sure the new table is not a heap 🙂

I learned very early on that NOTHING should ever go directly from file (or whatever) to table because of the crap factor that every mentions.  I also use a...

… if I'd blog about my work I'd have to start with half a page of rant about what's wrong with users and relationally acceptable data, or at...

I don't necessarily pre-stage (with two separate staging areas), but I do prefer to do no (or minimal) transformations when I bring data into the staging area. All my...

well the biggest pro I'd say is you can check issues in the data easier if transformation fails because someone was again too stupid to place the correct values...

I'm a fan of prestage

purely that people who send you data "DO NOT KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING" 🙂

date format is normally the killer, and if it comes from excel...

jeff is correct , as are you- but avoid 10% growth at all costs, it gets painfull when you're in petabyte territory