Excellent article @hugo. THANKYOU.

Question : You menationed "The standard T-SQL INSERT ... SELECT statement will also use the bulk load method if the total number of rows inserted is large enough, as...

Now this is weird. I understand sys.servers is the right place to look at OLEDB provider. I have a linked server that shows SQLNCLI as provider in sys.servers but when...

You guys are correct. Sys.sysservers is deprecated and shouldn't be use

I think the real question is any difference between SQLNCLI vs SQLNCLI11?

I had this problem once, can't remember what was the issue. Do you see any errors in bootstrap logs?

i)

Assuming you are on SQL server 2012 and above, you will have to set password at project level as well as at package level. One option that worked for me...