I like the cross apply, but not sure it's needed here.

Going back to the original, asita, is the goal to bucket rows for a report of some sort? what's the...

Audit and xEvents can capture this, but it's not a rolling level. You'd get a lot of data back. Potentially you could capture, periodically read a window of data and...

Why doesn't the CASE work for you?

FWIW, the 8KB schedule is online: https://eightkb.online/

Mr. Moden presenting, if you can make it, at Level 8192. Well above the 400-500 level of other sessions.

The more structured things are, the less likely they are to innovate, and often, we are tightly structured with planned work in our daily activities. Changing things up helps us...

I'd watch both. Filestream has performed well for many customers. The downside is usually the code changes to take advantage of the feature. If you are storing documents that are...

What I'd say about the backup approach is that it is better, but if you are changing this set of schema/data often, then this can be a pain point to...

You haven't really explained what a "problem" is to you. You mean the server will run slower? It could with any insert in bulk.

Filestream has tradeoffs, which is what you...

A few choices:

CREATE TABLE Vals(Val VARCHAR(20));
GO
INSERT INTO Vals VALUES
('AAAB-AA-43-DDD-2')
,('RECA-AA-3-CCC-1')
,('RECA-AB-31-abc-1')
,('RECA-C-3-T');

GO

SELECT 
 REPLACE(Val,'RECA-','') AS Option1
 , CASE WHEN SUBSTRING(val, 1, 5) = 'RECA-'
     THEN SUBSTRING(val,...

I'm not quite sure what you mean, but with your questions.

1. The backup file will contain this data inserted into a FILESTREAM table, so it will be larger.
2. Not sure...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18996157/what-does-lock-communication-buffer-resources-mean

https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/49538/sql-server-deadlocked-on-lock-communication-buffer-resources

These might help. A new one to me as well.

If you are asking if the CAST can be part of an insert, it can.

A few things noted above, but also query store can help here, and force a particular plan for a query.

I've queried Microsoft, but it looks like encryption is set by protocol, not IP. So while you might be able to force encryption for IP connections from anywhere, which likely...

You should have a deployment script (s) of some sort to do this. Something like FlywayDB would make this easy: https://flywaydb.org/

Disclosure: I work for Redgate Software.