You can use Standard Edition with basic availability groups. There is a chance that one group might fail over with a database and not others, but you can write scripts...

CHARINDEX finds a position in a string. You tell it what you're looking for. SUBSTRING gets partial strings. Combine them to extract the items you need.

If there are...

As Thom suggested, make an attempt.

Use the gender to group data.

First, how do you know this is excessive paging? I assume you mean Windows paging to disk. Or is this  VMWare paging? You should be able to tell us that...

You can also batch the inserts so that you insert 10,000 rows, then commit. Then repeat.

I've worked in

Finance - care about testing to different degrees. Overall high. Usually a copy of production to test against
Education - Ha, testing?
Utilities - Some...

I think that's definitely an issue. I think tackling a specific case or two (or four) is the best way, giving some examples and helping people get a concept and...

A couple things.

Production data is fine, PII isn't. You can mask/change this.

Tetsing in production might be necessary, but really you ought to simulate the same thing...

Perhaps, but they are looking to partner with some other offshore structures, like windmills or wave generators. In that case, you'd limit some of the potential wave issues, or you'd...