Autoshrink - never. I mean, I've struggled to think of a scenario where this makes sense. Paul Randal, who managed and wrote code for the storage engine thinks this should...

That's a skill in and of itself. Comments should go through the PR, but if not, I would hope your client allowed click through to the original branch for the...

Never used it myself. Just stumbled on it.

No idea. Maybe use XE and see what the difference is, grab the plans.

+1 for simple mode

I am aware of that now, having gone from 15-20C temps in May in Colorado to 4-15C in ANZ in June. I have an appreciation for time and weather down...

Turbo does this for apps on...

Looks like svn -> git shouldn't be hard. Convert it, then load to Bitbucket

https://blokspeed.net/blog/2010/09/converting-from-subversion-to-git

Git is better, way better, IMHO, but it's just a repo. Comments need not be lost.

What are you thinking with Azure? Be careful about talking about servers in the cloud without specifying what you're thinking. The nomenclature gets confusing, and there are lots of options.

If...

Migration is what I'd do, as outlined above, but why 2016? If you have the 2016 license, but if you're upgrading with new licenses, why not 2017?

I think we have some language issues. You have a VM in Azure, which runs SQL Server, is that right? Inside here, you have a backup policy for SQL Server?...

The WHERE clause runs before the COLUMN list, despite being coded later. Your WHERE clause needs to have the same calculation, or you need a CTE to do this ahead...

Actually, sys.time_zone_info has an is_dst_enabled column you can use here. SQL Server should match this up correctly.

Time zones are tricky, but this might help you:

DECLARE @t DATETIMEOFFSET...

What's the benefit to moving to Python?  I might ask that. Python is really good at handling some complex string things, and with SQL 2017+, you could do the Python...

Which "file"? The database file?

Once the switch and delete is logged, AFAIK, you cannot recover this data from the partitioned table without a full restore. What I might do instead...