To double check a few more things:

On the "fast" server - I created the database and log on each of the different drives (instead of just log on the drive...

Standard is the 72 second one, enterprise is 3 seconds.

Though, shouldn't make a difference.

I have a ticket with Microsoft support but they haven't found and answer yet either.

Just making a...

bah! browser crashed and ate my reply...

Anyway:

Sounds like a job for... the DBA-Team 🙂

Yep, verified instant file init was working, trace flag and reviewed logs to confirm.

The drive I/O from...

Apologies, I should have provided more context.

This issue has been repeated nearly 50 times, and I've been able to repeat it on demand over the course of about 21 days.

The...

Yeah, I did a bit more digging and they seem to have two types:

The first is just selecting URL and doing backup to blob storage.

Treats it just like a different...

Yep and that works but feels so wrong 🙂

Thank you, that helped immensely.

I didn't even realize those options existed (never saw them in any of the training materials, blogs, documentation I have reviewed).

Good news is that those options...

That was my response that is is depreciated, but I still wanted to understand it.

So I wonder why my profiler trace isn't showing that activity, maybe a function of table...

That is what I'm after.

What is the proper name of that feature so I can properly Google it?

Good point!

I was wondering about odd scenarios with dirty read for that select or if it could ever fail to read 100% of the rows up front so it attempts...

Yeah, that was all I could come up with, just wanting more rows, because on a production system it just seems like it would be pointless duplication of rows...

I just...

Apologies: SSAS tabular mode I am creating a relationship between those two tables in the designer. Then when you open to analyze in Excel and add those columns...

OF COURSE, I forgot about the CUBE and it being an abstraction layer.

So when it generates itself it will just know that it joins to the Date dimension and the...

Didn't realize MDX was required, I thought you could use SQL depending on how you configure it?

Yes, columnstore is a good idea, we are looking at 2014 upgrade in around...

I was afraid of that... I was hoping for some nifty WITH option, something like the RESULT SET option in SQL 2012 but with an option to just not return...