ANSI PADDING is an often-overlooked yet impactful setting in SQL Server that determines how trailing spaces are handled in CHAR and VARCHAR.
Monitoring Database Autogrowth Settings is important and is what I often end up discussing in Comprehensive Database Performance Health Check;
The heap or clustered index choice changes the reads of every scan. The demos measure forwarded records in a heap, a range query on both kinds of table, and the size of a nonclustered index on a wide key, and says when a heap is the right choice.
Identify oversized data files with FILEPROPERTY, separate internal free space from disk capacity, and review one-time shrink choices.
Lots of people asked me to create a video on my earlier blog post SQL SERVER – Script to List Database File Latency. Here is the video.
If a client has many databases, this script finds the most used database files. Here is my SQL in Sixty Seconds video on it.