What about UNC path vs drive letter or is the file stored locally?

As another thought, are you using the 32-bit driver or the 64-bit driver?

This is the link I found...

Another option (others may shoot this down as a bad idea) would be to turn on filestream access on the folder and have the SQL side mostly pulled out of...

I second Ken's approach.  I like having my application logic at the application layer and my database logic in the database.

I would much rather have 2 stored procedures (pre java...

One other thing you will want to be certain of is that the drive letter doesn't change.

It USUALLY doesn't from a format, but I've seen Windows do stranger things before.

CXCONSUMER was introduced in SQL Server 2017 CU3.  14.0.2037.2 is NOT CU3.

you are not "patched to current" as current SQL Server 2017 is CU23 which is version 14.0.3381.3

Even CU3 is...

I agree with you 110%!

I almost always use CTE's over nested selects.  I find them easier to read and easier to test and debug. "SELECT * FROM <cte name>" after...

From my experience, nested selects vs CTE's have had very similar performance.

If you have a SQL formatting tool (such as RedGate SQL Prompt or ApexSQL Refactor), I would start by...

Your XML ends with:

<InterfaceDefinition><id>Radio

so right away, I see that id and InterfaceDefinition are both unclosed.  I expect these are not root level XML tags, so you probably have more that...

Quick look at your code, your XML is missing closing tags, so it is malformed XML and as such cannot be cast to XML.

My opinion for process - install it on test, test the crap out of it, if no fault found, install on live.

As for "should" you install it?  I would.  SP2...

Alternately to Ant-Green's suggestion, if you go to the SSRS webpage, there is a download button in the top right corner (if you didn't disable it) where you can download...

To add to what Grant said, it could also be that there isn't much "new" to add.  I forget the version, but I think it was 2014 where a lot...

I've not set up a linked server to Access before, but my general checklist for things related to linked servers AND files on disk/network is:

1 - who is it connecting...

Having then log out and back in would probably make sense as I expect it would refresh their permissions.

As for what they are doing in SQL, I would be mildly...

I think probably what will help you the most is something like this:

https://aka.ms/sql-permissions-poster

It is a rather large poster, but it gives you all SQL related permissions, what they mean and...