I do agree on the points about data quality and in certain industries, it does seem that technology hasn't been fully embraced.

However, as IT professionals, we can make a significant...

Yes, all good advice.

Our testing was the only activity on the server. As the process of changing alignment is destructive the only files left on the disk were the test...

😀 yeah we tried to recruit Harry Potter as a DBA but we couldn't afford him:-P

Agree about the file size - from one of the blogs I read that, so...

That's the problem we had - some results were better some were worse but from server to server the better or worse ones were not the same.

At this stage I...

I've read the articles on partition alignment and seeing the potential gains of 20-30% was quite keen to try them out.

We use a SQL2005 environment over WS2003, however, the original...