Sorry about the confusion on the owners... I'm used to folks putting everything into production as "dbo".  Yes, the views you speak of would certainly and easily solve that problem...

Yep... I concur with PW... "Create or Replace" is definitely Oracle code and the string functions available are quite different in SQL Server.

So, which do you need, Oracle Code or...

Oh, yeah... almost forgot... you can get a list of available collations using the following code...

SELECT *

FROM ::fn_helpcollations()

Yes...

My recommendation (for U.S. installations) is to select a collation that is Dictionary Order, Case Insensitive (CI) and Accent Sensitive (AS).  This will normally be done during installtion of the server...

It's in Books Online under [Create Index] but here's a quick example for what you want to do...

CREATE UNIQUE  NONCLUSTERED INDEX index_name

    ON tablename (columnlist)

No... you can query the SysObjects table directly although Microsoft recommends against doing that because they may change the table name (I believe they did in 2005).

Make your code refer to a "linked server" and use a 4 part naming convention everywhere in your code.  Then, you can just repoint the linked server at whatever box...

Sometimes, as in your case, you have to ask "Why" someone can't use the answer provided because they haven't explained themselves correctly... I imagine you get that alot

If you don't know how many rows will be deleted, you can do something like this...

    SET ROWCOUNT 5000 
 SELECT 1 --"Primes" the rowcount so the loop works
  WHILE @@ROWCOUNT...

Shoot... I'm a little outside my league on this one... I'll tell you this, though... if you run this from a command prompt...

OSQL -L

... and it doesn't list the server...

Hadn't thought about that... if the DB was NOT properly detached, the procedure for recovery is quite long.  It's do-able, but ya gotta hold your mouth just right while you're...

I've found that "UPDATE x WITH (ROWLOCK)" does very little in containing SQL Server's escalation of locks to rows instead of pages or extents.  It sure doesn't hurt to have...

Yep... knew that about the conversion and SN... like others, I normally avoid float because of it's binary limitations on accuracy.  Because I avoid it, I didn't even think that...

Why?  What's the problem with that method?  The "other user should not come to know"...

Does the MDF or LDF have the "Read Only" attribute set?