Are you on Standard or Enterprise Edition?

If on Enterprise Edition, you can use data compression to reduce the size of the data stored.  Row compression is very little overhead but...

Yes, you should be able to apply NOT to the conditions to get the opposite of the current conditions.

You likely shrunk the log file, but the db needs that log space so it is reallocating it.  Unfortunately, newly allocated log space requires pre-formatting.  That pre-formatting pauses all activity...

No.  There is no way to automatically have compression apply to all tables or indexes in a db.  You must specify compression as part of the table/index create.

We have a monitoring tool that reads Windows Event Log entries for Failure and Success of SQL Job executions.

Hmm, maybe?!:

When that tool reads a "job success" as the last msg...

Therefore, the clus index on the dbo.order_items should be ( order_id, $IDENTITY ) and not just ( $IDENTITY ).  Since the parent key is sequential,...

I think the current query can be tuned up and that it should definitely help performance.  Will it help it enough to meet your needs?  You'll just have to test...

Therefore, the clus index on the dbo.order_items should be ( order_id, $IDENTITY ) and not just ( $IDENTITY ).  Since the parent key is sequential, this key...

If you have very volatile tables like that, you should put them in a separate filegroup and then shrink only the files associated with that filegroup.

You especially do not want...

You should still never shrink a database (at the db level), only specific db files (at the file/file_id level).

One must also consider the enormous difficulty of what the MS folks are trying to do.

I get asked all the time about "(simple) rules for tuning indexes" since that is...

Or this instead?:

;WITH src
AS (SELECT s.PK
          ,MAX(CASE WHEN s.ColName = 'Col1' THEN s.Value END) AS Col1Value
  ...

I AM NOT A SQL LICENSING EXPERT.

But as I understand the licensing, if you do ANY production work AT ALL on the instance, then you cannot use Developer Edition for...

I'd use REVERSE because it's considerably less overhead.

SELECT BANAME, RIGHT(BANAME, CHARINDEX(' ', REVERSE(BANAME)) - 1) AS BANAME_VALUE
FROM #sample

Personally I think I'd rather see the days as columns in the same row, i.e. a column for Monday, a column for Tuesday, etc.., with one per month and one...