What's the purpose of the CTE?

Also, giving the CTE the same name as the table does not seem to be a brightest idea ever.

Clustered index on ProcessDate is a must...

To cover that 0.1% I can add triggers to the mix.

they must have table "inserted" available with all the records in it, the whole set. And it cannot be formed...

Gosh... I agree that it's been quite a while but it seems to me that SQL Server 6.5 and 7 worked just fine in this area and...

Availability Groups

Nice feature in theory.

In reality it's less reliable then the data houses it's supposed to protect.

Maybe in future they will bring it up to the standard, but so far...

Adaptive Joins

Attempting to change execution plans on fly after execution started seems quite dodgy.

It still does not eliminate the affects of wrong estimations, but it comes at a significant cost...

New Cardinality Estimation Engine

Another unfortunate product of MS attempt to jump on a Big Data vagon.

It's good for massive aggregations, but really sucks when it comes to fine selection queries...

Extended events.

Don't think there is much to discuss here.

They ditched convenient, user friendly Profiler with a scripting tool for the sake of adding several new types of events to trace...

Columnstore Index.

I don't want to discuss the troubles with initial versions of columnstore, which put so many developers out of using it. It's all water under the bridge. Let's talk...

Query Store

The feature is called to let a DBA to choose an earlier used plan when a new plan chosen by the optimizer is, well, not so optimal.

But why the...

Here is a little challenge.

Look back at 10, 15 years of new feature in or around SQL Server you've learned or heard about.

What share of those features...

SQL Server 2008 is out of support now (which was the reason we upgraded all of our SQL Servers) but your question is valid for SQL Server 2016.

For a...

when it opens in Excel it will be treated as text.

with a single quote at the beginning of it.

which is not the intention, I guess.

The way around is to save...

Here is a little challenge.

Look back at 10, 15 years of new feature in or around SQL Server you've learned or heard about.

What share of those features did really make...

It might sound paradoxal, but those who promote learning new stuff are the ones who failed to learn the old one.

They are hoping for a "quick grip" on technology, and...

When you insert a bulk of data, say, 8 MB (let’s take a small bulk) of a daily load, it fills 1000 pages full, and partially 1001st page, if it’s...