Well, I'll disagree slightly on the Standard.

If the entire instance fails, all databases will move. If there is a reason for one failover, you can detect this with...

It's not really covered, or not covered like that.

Restore where? In a VM in Azure?

There's nothing that keeps your db synced with files.You'll need a process that can verify what's out of sync.

I'd look at the suggestions above, especially Data Lake.

Or random sections of worksheets used for different things.

Or auto-calculate macros.

It's not better, it's different

One server - single point of failure, depending on being able to connect to the other  instances, easier to admin,

On each...

CLE - column level encryption?

I think you want this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/relational-databases/security/encryption/extensible-key-management-using-azure-key-vault-sql-server?view=sql-server-2017

EKM should be valid in R2.

As Steve mentioned, the question isn't well phrased for us.

You can use DateAdd to add days to a date.

What I'd suggest is you mock up 5-10...

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.