It's from a private list with MS that the option was suggested. If this is not a test environment, I wouldn't enable that without guidance from MS. In fact, with...

That's true, but you always need a first full backup. There's no trickiness here. If your primary database hasn't had a full backup without copy only, you are asking for...

Many foreign sites will use a few flags to determine the language you want to site to be. Some will auto-detect, so many of us in the US will see...

No, IIRC, you need a network name.

So if I had two Windows hosts, SQL01 and SQL02, I might have the cluster be SQLSales. Essentially each has two names...

Finland is coming. Might try to convince my wife to go back then. That or see if I can get into SQLGrillen.

Or just relax.

One other note, I get two different encryption values:

2017 - 0x02000000A584538F00817EFA13FB8E176BC435F7FD2A3AEDC9E79AFD2DD203B1356DB2CE
2016 - 0x01000000CBBF1DA4C95CABB66EDE087B7EA983C599D663DB2DA80D49
2017 seems to decrypt 2016, but not vice versa. Need to test more,  but...

That's what I tend to recommend. Easier and more consistent than debugging the semi-regular failure of repl after a deployment.

No idea, but I'll try to track this down.

You are welcome.

Please mark that as the answer

An Availabilty Group requires WSFC. It does not require a Failover Clustered Instance (FCI), which is a SQL Server cluster.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/availability-groups/windows/failover-clustering-and-always-on-availability-groups-sql-server

Log shipping uses log backups. That's it. A full is required (or full+diff) to get the system setup, but log shipping moves transaction log backups to the secondary and restores...