No. Everything it really workload dependent. Early on I'd build a 2x4 (2 cores, 4GB) for a new SQL VM, and then add resources if needed. These days I'd likely...

I usually open the firewall for 1433 on VMs/other machines. I do this with

netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name="SQL Server" dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=1433

Make sure...

This isn't really a good question as listed. Is this the query you want or do you want to further filter results by caller?

Ultimately you should produce a...

It would be good to see more information, even mocked up.

Is amount used in other queries, or in WHERE/HAVING/ON clauses? If so, then adding it to the index...

What's the final code being run in SSMS? Can you show that?

Luis' solution will work, but you need to be sure this happens. You might think about ensuring that on a delete, that this routine runs for the deleted.stakeholder/groupid combination in...

Perhaps silly question, but have you rebooted?

I tried today from 17.3 and got the message that my cmdlets were too old (v20), and updated. SSMS then found them...