In database mirroring you need to specify the fail over partner in the connection string that is in the config file of the application. The code is usualy FAILOVER...

You should be able to do this using Row_Number

WITH [Request1] AS

(SELECT ROW_NUMBER() OVER (pARTITION BY date ORDER BY duration ASC) AS ROWID, * FROM Request)

SELECT * FROM [Request1] WHERE ROWID...

I tend to let SSIS pick the formats for me as it is usually quite accurate.

When there are problems with the data from flat files is quite often comes down...

Char in my text file = string [DT_STR] or Unicode string [DT_WSTR]

Varchar in my text = string [DT_STR] or Unicode string [DT_WSTR]

Those table row counts are no where big enough to be considering partioning, so I would look at other ways to improve performance such as Indexing and optimizing queries.

Also...

1) yes you can change back

2)It would depend on how responsive your vendors are at making code changes, from an admin / development point of view it does make...

How many rows do the Five tables hold?

Are these Five tables also used by the SAP application?

There is no need for cursor to do this, use Row_Number()

SELECT TRX_CODE,

ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY TRX_CODE ORDER BY TRXID) AS TRXID FROM YourTable

No you can not, unless you have transaction log backups since your last full back up

The best way to do this is SSIS would be to write a T-SQL script to do the update and then use SSIS to execute the script.

It depends, it you are only storing Numbers in the column then the datatype should be really a Numeric data type.

Otherwise i would do a conversion on the stored...

It looks like the numbers are stored in a Char/Varchar column.

Convert them to an Integer then sort by the Integer data.

not easily , you could try out a third party log-reader to recover the data but these can be expensive to purchase. So I guess it depends on how...

Then unless you have documented your changes, they are lost..

The easiest way would be to use the import/export wizard in SSMS