Lost the point on a technicality - LOL! sys.column_store_row_groups not supported in SQL 2012.

The research to answer the question correctly was very interesting! Thanks for the question.

Ok, we are probably going to install the 2014 tools only. Thanks!

SQLRNNR - can you please clarify what issues you saw with multiple editions installed? We would typically install tools for every version so we can use the appropriate tool with...

Since we have other servers to host SQL2008 R2, our plan is to install newest to oldest and try to omit 2008 R2 from these 2 platforms. We had a...

oops!

Ye scurrrrvy dogs, System F - arrrr - 'tis a fine choice to be makin!

Thanks for your quick response and further testing proves you are correct. I set up a full backup to complete while log shipping was enabled and then ran the jobs...

Yeah! I got to finish my lunch! Thanks for the question, this feature opens the door for me to do a deeper dive!

I did learn a bit about replication, and I selected what I thought was the best answer - B.

It might surprise the average person how much more difficult the DBA job (or many tech jobs) would be without Google, Bing or sites like this.

I executed the same code on SQL 2012 SP1 and got the same results - 2,3,5

That is a new piece of helpful information. Thanks! 😀

Thanks for the opportunity to win a great reference book!

USE SantaDelivery2013;

GO

SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER(PARTITION BY Country ORDER BY GoodDeedsYTD DESC) AS "Row Number",

p.LastName, s.GoodDeedsYTD, a.Country

FROM...

Thought it was a Merge Join too.