Thanks and you are welcome. Got a couple more on my list, but looking for suggestions if there are things you want to learn or think others need to know.

The cloud vendors have government certified cloud offerings in the US.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/government/

https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/

I wouldn't be surprised if there are vendors offering something similar in non-US spaces.

https://www.sqlservercentral.com/stairways/stairway-to-alwayson

There is no Always On. This is an Availability Group. Use that term to ensure searches and questions make sense.

Then answer Andreas' questions.

Unspammed post. It might have been a report from a user or some glitch in the automated process. Either way, it's fixed.

Do the buildings change often? Honestly, I'd expand on Scott's solution. If there were 20 buildings, or 100, now and they rarely change, I'd just calculate all the distances now...

Scott has given an example, and Erland is right. It depends. Test both ways for your situation.

Phil has good advice. If the patterns aren't consistent, then use REVERSE and find the first occurrence.

All of these products work well for making, compressing, and restoring backups. I'm biased because I work for Redgate, but I'd suggest you download an eval for different ones and...

I think the dev story in the cloud is hard. I've seen people want to use RDS/Azure SQL DB for dev work, but the backup thing causes pain. This still...

John,

I don't. MS has been very resistant to syntactic sugar, basically anything that isn't hard to program, they don't want to build and support. They think this is why you...

It might be interesting to just see your impressions and experiments. I'd think you present this as "what I learned" rather than "this is what you should do"

I haven't seen a comparison.

that being said, if you're learning it, maybe you want to write one. I'd pay you, even for a series of articles as you learn the...

I would concur that a calendar table is the best choice here. There aren't functions that map out specific dates to a custom calendar. While you can code for this,...

I think Phil is showing a restore of the database from the snapshot, essentially rewinding time.

If you want to update what's in the snapshot with new changed data, you cannot....