Yeah, Steve that was a good catch!  It's one of those things that I remember knowing, but just never put two and two together.

First you need to define a DSN using the correct port.  Then you can setup the linked server to use that DSN.  You can't just select "SQL Server" for the...

Thanks for reinforcing my point about cost effectiveness!

I might add that unless your company is running *NIX servers or a mainframe (for DB2)-or is planning to-you might as well stop wasting time and just use SQL Server. ...

Just wrap it in a transaction and include the appropriate error checking.

BEGIN TRAN

ALTER DATABASE statustest SET SINGLE_USER

WITH ROLLBACK IN 20 SECONDS

IF @@ERROR <> 0 GOTO ErrBlock

do updates....

IF @@ERROR <> 0...

I thought you had placed it in Simple...  Yes, if your db is in Bulk Logged recovery mode all data pages affected by a bulk operation will be included in...

If by updates you mean changing data, the CM does not and probably should not have sysadmin rights.  db_Datareader and db_Datawriter are probably more than sufficient.

As for a tool to...

What a subject!  You need a book, not a post in a forum.  I'll give you my thoughts on the matter (but remember what free advice is worth)

Change Management  -...

For data storage you basically have two broad choices; magnetic or optical storage.  There are some new technologies using high density optical storage that are in development, but generally speaking,...

This is actually a prett common occurrence.  Check out this article:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;305635

IBM's on demand computing is not the same thing as a grid.  On demand is when you buy a machine that, as Steve mentioned, actually has more capacity than you...

Given the amount of time required to do the index rebuild, I'm not surprised to see a pretty large t-log backup right after.  The only mystery is how it gets...

Unless you can identify each client that will consume (not necessarily directly access) SQL Server you need to go with "Per processor" licensing. 

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/howtobuy/multiplexing.asp

Generally this is difficult to do...

I'm not sure exactly what you mean.  The SQL Server engine provides a certain level of ACID properties "out of the box" and you, the programmer, can specify different levels...

Use a cursor to loop through tblxxx and do the insert and update within the cursor fetch loop.