Right, but the administration of everything else except availability groups or replication can be simplified. So yes, the  cname is not helpful for that, but it will save time on...

we create CNAMES and make our Developers use those for connection strings specifically so we can upgrade or replace servers behind the scenes.
if everyone connects to the cname [SuperServer],...

if this is deployed to the SSISDB catalog, then there is a detailed log you can check(SSMS>>Object Explorer>>Integration Service Catalogs>>SSISDB>>TheSpecificProject
since you say it runs on Saturday without errors, but...

yes, SSRS can use an expression to validate the length of your input; 
this stackoverflow has an example that was testing a credit card length = 16, basically the same...

As always, it depends on the implementation. 
if it is just an SSMS consumption,
at the procedure level, all you can do is add an error;
IF LEN(@param)...

yes, that was it, thank you Jacob and Sue!
i was locked into search dmvs with *xe* in them.
Awesome, and thank you again!

GailW here's something I wrote to enumerate the people who inherit permissions from a group, and do not have an explicit login in sys.server_principals

IF OBJECT_ID('[dbo].[sp_help_adusers]') IS...

one day back on 07/28/2016 i was inspired to create a procedure to do this;
as everyone has already identified, the problem is keeping up with releases. how many patches, CU's...

if the columns are already varbinary, are you using procedures to return unencrypted data for selects? if you are already doing that, you should use procs for insert/update/delete as well.

so much of encryption depends on the data type of the destiantion column, and the type of encryption you care to use.
most encryption methods expect a varbinary column, so...

Gail addressed the performance aspect of it; fragmentation is very low on the "fix it" list as far as performance goes.

If you want to address the fragmentation, here's...

as far as tracking if it happens again, i''d create an extended event to capture database creation and deletion, and add login disabled, as well as anything else you think...

I think you need to use a recursive CTE in this case, so that all possible relations are created through joining to the data itself .
if you are not...

it sounds like they are allowed to query the data with their tools of choice, but often write bad queries; maybe you could use  the resource governor in that case;...