You are correct. Use roles in SQL, equivalent to groups in AD. Always do this, even with AD groups. Use a SQL role for permissions and then add the AD...

If you get 823/824/825, you likely have some hardware/driver issue. You should really stress the system, especially storage, and use HammerDB, SQLIO, something to be sure you have everything working....

Failover manually. First sentence: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/failover-and-failover-modes-always-on-availability-groups?view=sql-server-2017

Interesting and thanks for the note. Glad things are working for you.

There is an amazing amount of slop in today's business world. I have no doubt the bank will continue, albeit with worse profits this year. Or maybe no profit, but...

I used to like to keep sa enabled in case someone did something stupid like remove the admin group because of a mis-click. These days, I would disable it and...

I'll second Thom's advice. This is asking for trouble and a poor habit.

Please create a new account that has limited access to what is needed. Use that. The...

And link in the database with a string URL? Is there any concern about synchronization?

FWIW: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/fd5acaca-9911-4168-a82d-02a92c0d5a80/can-filestream-directory-containers-be-encrypted-with-efs?forum=sqlsecurity

I think EFS would work, or Bitlocker, but you should test

Glad it worked. I'd say undo the setup and restore the cert, then setup again. It's not that complicated. It is stressful though.

As Sue mentioned, you won't get any improvement here. There is slight value with more files at times, and there are often better performance on different drives, but slight. Really...

You can also use a proc to check if something changed. As sgmuson noted, you can use a semaphore (flag) to not editing. however, what can also be done is...