• What about combining it with weekly snapshot replication too? I think this will also cover off the DDL angle and while it's true that eg a table definition change won't be replicated with tx rep., it should be covered in the snapshot. I thought from the OP that you were mainly looking for ways of backing up the standby? Unless your schemas change daily, replication could do the trick?

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    Note to developers:
    CAST(SUBSTRING(CAST(FLOOR(NULLIF(ISNULL(COALESCE(1,NULL),NULL),NULL)) AS CHAR(1)),1,1) AS INT) == 1
    So why complicate your code AND MAKE MY JOB HARDER??!:crazy:

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