Whoever did the install needs to add your login to the admin role on the instance. And yeah, you need to be admin on the SQL Server instance to actually...

Like anything else, practice, practice, practice. Create a database in Azure SQL, then figure out how to access it, how it gets backed up, how to restore it, build tables,...

Spammed it.

To only do a subset of the data, you're very limited. Transactional replication is probably your best bet, but you will need to deal with the separation of the domains,...

There are probably an infinite number of ways to schedule a backup. However, most people will use SQL Agent, which is built right into SQL Server instances (assuming you're...

100% agreement

Extended Events are your bestest friend. Specifically, in addition to the normal query captures of rpc_completed and sql_batch_completed, you can look at ole_db_data_reader to see remote queries specifically.

My answer to this is always the same. What are the Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) of the organization? With those defined, can you prove that...

No arguments here.

I've seen the SQL Edge in action. It's just SQL Server under the covers. That's your single best bet. Just backing up @Ant-Green.

Here's one example

Have you looked for disc corruption? It honestly looks like things are messed up at a low level.

Microsoft's recommendations are pretty good, and, I think, based on Jonathan Kehayias' guidance.

Optimizer...

Just so we're clear, CTFP = Cost Threshold for Parallelism.

And I agree. Changing it from the default value is a must. In addition to picking an arbitrary value (common practice...