As a shop that has been using Microsoft products for close to 20 years, we are quite leery of in place upgrades so our version upgrades tend to include server...

There could be a cost in translating the character field to an integer somewhere between the application and hardware; likely in the operating system level. Ideally integers suffer no...

I tend to frown on enabling hyperthreading on a SQL server box unless the environment is primarily quick transactions.  While the logic for insuring processor affinity of a task/process/thread is...