The table would need to contain, and be keyed on, workerID, year and Course_Code.  This should be a unique key if that is your rule (that is, no single worker...

Consider, for example, with design #1, a unique constraint will insure that the same course is not entered twice for the same year.

But for design #2, you'd have to insure...

You should only ever use the first method, period, no matter what your current requirements are.

The second approach would be a maintenance and query nightmare.

You don't need to do point-in-time recovery if you take a differential at the exact point you want to restore to, just like with a full backup (which was OP's...

Perhaps you could take a differential backup instead of a log backup.  That would not interfere with any other backup process (and you wouldn't have to apply any tran logs...

I've been a DBA on SQL Server for 20+ years and only for certain vendors have I ever had to go thru permission by permission.  I have to admit, for...

NOTE: I modified the quote to use numbers (rather than generic bullets) to make discussing each one easier.

(1) How long will the update process take to update that...

(1) Verify that the 'cost threshold for parallelism' has been set properly (i.e. increased from the default) on the new instance

(2) Verify that the tempdb settings -- number of files,...

Yes, recompile the table / view rather than individual proc(s).

If you recompile a proc, only that specific proc gets recompiled.  If you...

Very strange.

Make sure there is no trigger on the table that might affect UPDATEs.

Make sure ID 23654 only matches one row in the table (so that you're not just seeing...

Nope, as people have stated about that. In this area, it's your mind that's wrong. NULL ("UNKNOWN") is obviously not FALSE...

That is my understanding as well. But I'd still suggest talking to someone who specializes in licensing because it's quite complex now.

XML will definitely be slow.

It sounds like you're going from SQL Server to SQL Server. If that's the case, native format would be fastest.

If you're allowed to, take your own differential backup (or have one taken), then use that to bring the restored db current.  Much easier than restoring a long list of...

Instead of an INNER JOIN, do a FULL OUTER JOIN.