There is another release of 2008 slated soon, which should update things a bit. I work for Red Gate, and haven't compared them, but many people seem to love SQL...

If SQL server is consistently using 80%, then you don't have a big enough box. Or things aren't tuned well.

It will spike periodically. Anything less than 5 minutes I'd look...

default port uses 1433, named instances pick a port. They tend to try for the same port, but there's some algorithm that picks a port out of a range.

Use the...

Transaction logs are ALWAYS used. Even in simple mode. They are cleared often, but they are still used.

Can you better explain what you think is happening by "not generated"?

Check out the views. The writes are easy since you could always Q them (think Service Broker) and have the receiver determine where to write things. I'd also consider moving...

Are you SP2 and above?

replication does this. bidirectional transactional handles this fine.

Messaging is preferred, but if you're doing this, why not use Service Broker? Why a third party?

Having the updates occur means that you...

Disk space is an OS function. you check the server itself to find this out. SQL Server has space reserved in its files, and sp_spaceused (and numerous other scripts) can...

Is this a cumulative update, post SP2?

Clusters have their own requirements for some patches. The READ ME with the patch should address cluster issues, and if it doesn't, I'd contact...

You can't easily do this in the maintenance plan. There needs to be logic to find the latest file, or read the msdb tables, to do this. It's not trivial,...

Nope, you can perhaps implement some loops to do this. I've used bcp to do this before. Some scripts on this site to help.

Best bet is build the DTS package,...

This can be tricky, and I don't think MS has done a great job explaining.

I've tended to look at BOL here (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190673.aspx) for guidance.

My understanding was AWE wasn't needed...

Bottom line: buy more disk space.

Permission to syscomments somehow?

Honestly the way to handle this is ensure your code is in a version control system. Keeping it on the server isn't really VCS.

I believe if you query Access, it goes through the DSNs configured inside the Access db to get to the data.

For the SQL stuff, you can setup a DSN the...