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...

I believe this is the regular network name. You can have DNS point here later, but this should just be SQL01 if the DNS would be SQL01.mydomain.com

I might also suggest that some of your CTEs might be better combined, returning more results, with the column(s) from the WHERE included. Not sure, but definitely need more information...

I would say Windows as the SQL AG story is more mature. Things should work fine on Linux, but I tend to avoid v1 versions of things like HA.

How's this:

WITH myCTE (u, entries, complete)
AS
(
SELECT u = ,
     Entries = 1,
   Complete =  CASE
       WHEN event1...

I like Steve's solution. I'd be tempted to make a permanent table that tracks capacity by time (and potentially by machine/location/etc). Then use that as a way of performing calculations.

Try this: https://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/kimberly/how-can-you-tell-if-an-index-is-really-a-duplicate/