This gets into establishing change control procedures and is a very big subject.  Generally though all changes should be scripted anyway, and as you run the scripts against dev the...

Ahh, that's what I thought.  While I'm not sure exactly what category they belong I've never thought of those statements being DDL with the possible exception of ALTER DATABASE.  However,...

There is nothing WRONG with posting an Oracle question here, but like Mike suggested you might get better results at an Oracle forum.

I have worked with Oracle in the past...

I can't think of any DDL statements that can't be put into a transaction... Do you have any specific examples?

Many people tend to believe that DROP and TRUNCATE can't be...

In a case where I'm not familiar with the system and specifically the queries being run against the database, I would recommend running a trace and then feeding the results...

You can copy tables and include any associated triggers, but you can't just copy triggers using DTS.

Triggers are fired once for each statement, not for each row affected.  The inserted table will hold all the rows inserted by a statement so all you need to do...

My guess is that it is a security issue.  Check the Security tab and make sure that you are aliasing all the right SQL logins to the correct Sybase user. ...

That's definately an oracle query.  Trunc, nvl, and sysdate are all Oracle functions.  It shouldn't work at all on SQL Server and you shouldn't be able to get an execution...

Generally the SQL Server optimizer does a very good job of "rewriting" queries so you don't have to worry about it.  About the only time I've seen problems is when...

Never, unless you check "remove free space" which I generally avoid for production databases...

When you backup the t-log it is truncated, but that doesn't mean that the physical file is...

The RESTORE FILELISTONLY command gives you the size of the files to be restored. 

I can't think of a reason an object wouldn't copy if it had been renamed...  Dependent objects like views, triggers, and procs will have problems if the objects they reference...

If the database exists already you have to use the REPLACE option.  Or you can delete the database and then run the RESTORE command as is...

No, SQL doesn't do a backup prior to expanding a file, although if that is the pattern you are seeing it is possible that someone created a process of some sort...