Apologies on the mistake about COMPRESS.

I know you think that 2016 is magic after the first insert.  The documentation says that new pages will be minimally logged. ...

Apologies on the mistake about COMPRESS.

I know you think that 2016 is magic after the first insert.  The documentation says that new pages will be minimally logged.  I'll...

Apologies on the mistake about COMPRESS.

I know you think that 2016 is magic after the first insert.  The documentation says that new pages will be minimally logged.  I'll have...

Using a loop to break things up into sections will cause the every section except the first to be FULLY LOGGED, which takes as much as 3 times longer...

Ooh, I accidentally left off one critical pre-step:

(0) Pre-allocate enough log space to handle the INSERTs.  How much total log space you'll need depends on whether minimal logging is available...

If none of your tables have indexes, you should start there, and fast!

First, review the missing index stats to see which column(s) should be used in the clustered index.  That...

You could also consider using a brand new filegroup, with at least two files, for the new/replacement table, which will reduce any interference with other filegroups.  Then again, you're stuck...

Not that I know of.

You could increase the log size to match the size it was originally if you wanted to.  That may take some time as log space must...

I'll assume that when you refer to "primary index" on the original table you mean "clustering index".  That is critical for copying the data (whereas a (nonclustered) primary key is...

Why are using this setting: SORT_IN_TEMPDB = OFF?

That's generally a very bad idea overall, esp. for larger indexes.

I would think you'd want the last Response rather than just picking one seemingly at random (as in your results) or the value that happened to be the MAX one...

You should get rid of the local variable as it's not needed and causes overhead.  Also, make sure that ANSI_NULLS and QUOTED_IDENTIFIER are set properly when the function is created.

If you have 200 entries, at least use a form of binary search rather than searching sequentially thru the list.  Even better would be just looking it up in a...

;WITH cte_distinct_customer_regions AS (
    SELECT DISTINCT Customer_Key, Customer_Name, Component, Region
    FROM Fill_Gaps
)

SELECT 
    cdc.Customer_Key, cdc.Customer_Name, cdc.Component, cdc.Region,
 ...

SQL Server has a system view, sys.dm_db_file_space_usage.  In that view is column modified_extent_page_count, which tells how many db pages have been modified since the last full db backup.  If you...