There is nothing 'out of the box' that monitors calls to procedures/functions and logs those somewhere.  If you have not setup an extended event, profiler trace - or possibly query...

We...

This would be the expected behavior - is there a question?

USE statements can be tricky. I suggest splitting your code into two procs, one to test status and one to do actions.

You could make the test status proc a...

That was just an example of how to call out to powershell from C# - and not something specific to an SSIS script task.  You need to make sure you...

    USE <your database>;
     GO

     IF coalesce(sys.fn_hadr_is_primary_replica(db_name()), 1) <> 1
  BEGIN
    ...

I would check the connection settings - and verify ARITHABORT setting is the same for both.  It definitely sounds like a different plan is being used when called from VB.NET...

You could change the approach to use a script task to execute your powershell script.  However, if you can do this in PS - then you almost certainly can do...

I am curious as to why you need to call out to PS directly from SQL Server.  If I need to call a PS script from SQL Server - I...

Best practise is always subjective, create the instances as they are needed, but my best practise is to never have more than 1 instance per cluster/machine, unless someone can...

Depends on the resource - if it is SQL Server installed into the cluster, the delays could be caused by how long it takes SQL Server to start and recover...

CipherTrust is one - you can search for others.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/SQLServer.ReadReplicas.html

Not sure on the licensing - that is going to depend on how AWS charges for each instance.  I would definitely look into that and compare the costs.

There are products available that will encrypt the data at a folder/volume level - so any file in that folder will be encrypted.  They are not inexpensive - but they...

Thanks and I tend to agree on Choose. It seems like a "magic hard coding" way of putting in values, which worries me. I prefer things to be more...