You'd have to work through the object model for your pacakage in the DTS ActiveX to move the mappings. It's possible, heck you could build the entire package at runtime.

One...

I'm really out of my area, but 127.0.0.1 is assigned by default to the network interface and allows local addressing. (local) is a SQL Server only connection item from their...

David has great advice listed above.

I'd add in there backup/restore on SQL Server.

SQL Agent, scheduling jobs, basic DTS packages for Excel import/export, sending SQL Mail.

Haven't seen any. SP4 had some AWE issues if you use that, so there was a patch for those.

This is a great place for SQLCLR in SQL Server 2005.

Also, are you trying to merge as in UNION with both sets of rows or merge as in adding more columns to your result set?

In addition to Kenneth's ?s.

There are ways with DBCC to read the log, but it's not easy to do, or easy to interpert. The third party products are worth the $$ easily and it's...

What's the delimeter?

You can always add a value at the end of your view

SELECT DISTINCT

...

I don't think there's an easy way to do this in T-SQL. Not sure there's a great way. I typically definite defaults and then assign them, that way they can...

Quite a few of the backup scripts in the script library on this site do this.

You need to open ports on the DMZ firewall. Not sure what they are for 6.5, but your firewall people should be able to log attempts from the db server...

if exists( select top 1 * from table)

will return true if there is data.

Agree with that. Management often doesn't know who is qualified and who isn't. Heck, in many companies the DBA is alone and no one is qualified to interview them!!!!

Here's my list. I have to say that #7 is new from when I first did this about 8 years ago. These aren't in any particular order.

1. Hitler - World War...