I saw a post today from Brent Ozar on this. They recommend doing index rebuilds as a way of testing the network load.

If you're in  simple mode,  maybe...

Must be some artifact of dealing with various numeric notations. Still, strange.

I have no idea. Precedence means that '1,,,,,' is converted to money, but I don't understand why the multiple separators don't cause an error.

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Keep in mind if you shrink the MDF, you can cause index fragmentation. You may need to rebuild indexes, which means space is needed in the files.

SQL Server...

I'll try to blog or write a better article(s) on this stuff as well. I demo it, but don't have great pieces on it. I'll rectify. If you have questions,...

Ah, you are correct. I think this didn't work at some point. You needed a login for this.

Containment  is potentially a choice here, but connection strings need to...

If they did, that's fine. I'd be sure, since if there is an issue, they may hold you liable. Double check.

If you do this in the db, you...

One thing to be aware of is the log transfer load. If you look at the log backup sizes over time, in aggregate, you'll get an idea of the network...