Whiel reading through the dig documentation today I came across the “nssearch” option:
$ dig +nssearch @192.168.1.1 daemons.net
SOA olympus.daemons.net. hostmaster.daemons.net. 1128483301 16384 2048 1048576 2560 from server olympus.daemons.net in 27 ms.
SOA olympus.daemons.net. hostmaster.daemons.net. 1128483259 16384 2048 1048576 2560 from server elysium.daemons.net in 41 ms.
This nifty little option can be used to view the SOA record maintained by all servers authoritative for a domain. If you choose to avoid using AXFR and manually update zone files, this option could be extremely useful.