Thank you for all you have shared and we are all looking forward to more hugs in the future. Get well soon! We miss you!

I like to include the schema (dbo.) in case I have multiple schemas in one database and want to make sure they are using the right set of tables when...

Thank you for posting back. I really appreciate your quick response. 🙂

Did you ever get this figured out? I am running into the same issue. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Yes, that is the version we are on.

For the instances, it depends on the databases and load levels, but we don't run any higher than 10-15 instances...

I am a fan of updating statistics too. EXEC SP_UPDATESTATS does the whole database or Update statistics [tablename] does one table.

We are using VMWare and have had great success virtualizing SQL Servers. We started out with our smaller SQL 2005 servers and are not doing any clustering on them....

I am so glad you posted this question. I didn't know the difference in Count. I did get it solely on the Union part. Thanks for teaching...