Snapshot doesn't right much to the distribution databases.  Your main concern is enough disk space to store the sch and bcp files the snapshot agent generates.

What is written to the...

Argh I hit "report" instead of "quote" on your post Mike, apologies can anyone bring back "3721595"

As for Brad, would also like to know how he's doing, not seen anything...

All depends what you need from the solution.

You can add an AG over the top of a FCI, but there are caveats, the biggest one for some is that data...

I don't think restoring master as a user database will work, since logins won't be logins, server objects won't be server objects and so on if they're not in...

Not done it in a while, but it's possible to restore master as a user database.  So you could restore it as "master_restore" script out and reply what you need...

It depends.

What are you protecting against?

You've enabled TDE at the data warehouse level, but what about the source systems?  What's stopping someone going to source and getting all your data?

You...

Have you created the same maintenance plan on all 3 nodes? They are stored in MSDB and as MSDB is not part of the availability groups, you need to have...

BCP would work, you may need to create the needed format file for it to load it.

What errors do you get as loading INT VARCHAR etc via BCP does work.

Alternatives...

Unfortunately you cannot set the database to read-only as that would break the replication topology as it couldn't write to the DB.

The best you could do is to have a...

It all depends what's required.

SSRS

PowerBI

Tableau

Qlik

All of these are data visualisation/reporting tools.

But it depends what's needed, just a simple dump of data, send mail is a crude way but hey it...

Good post.

Out of interest, did you manage to find the problem which caused the permission to be removed in the first place?

You're probably in breach of the licensing terms right now, the documents state in the "licensing for non prod" that if anything connects to another prod server, then it is...

You won't be able to put a developer server into anything that's mixed with Standard or Enterprise for licensing implications.

If your DEV/TEST server needs to be part of the availability...

What you've created as part of the CTE JOIN CTE is joining 1.8million records to 1.8million records where the engine has to build both 1.8 million record sets twice.

The expression...

Azure SQL Database doesn't come with an agent.  As such you need to use an elastic job instead to schedule these.

If you need the traditional SQL Agent, you will need...