My guess is 1. There is likely some large customer that wanted either their really poor OLTP system to handle 200+ keys, or there's a DW that needs this and...

Correct. You could have set up log shipping with a backup and never had a backup taken, so log shipping would not work. If log shipping is working, those are...

What's the use here? How often are things updated? Certainly you have duplicate data in that there are a large percentage of M and F in there, so you could...

If you look closely, it does do a count, but it qualifies the count in a way that results in scanning every row.

Keep in mind as well that despite any ordering in the clustered index, you might not get rows back in that order. If there is parallelism or the engine finds...

Apologies, I dont' have time to dig in, but this might help: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Dynamic+SQL/131473/

Does this help? https://sqlperformance.com/2013/04/t-sql-queries/update-statistics-duration

There's also this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/failover-clusters/windows/upgrade-sql-server-failover-cluster-instance-2008-2012?view=sql-server-2017

Since clusters can be used to upgrade, I think you can certainly patch one side to a new sp/cu and it will continue to work. You can also upgrade some...

Agree with Drew. I would only query employee, but I'd have a trusted FK here.

No strange risk here. no log shipping is taking place because no log backups. The secondary is sitting there. The primary will have issues at some point with space if...