Nope, no concern, however, in the event our network went down, we wanted to ensure that all sites were still up (this is for a hotel company). With transactional...

Thanks for the response. I thought of that, however, it needs to be bi-directional, so all updated, inserted, and deleted data at the regional servers needs to be reconciled...

That's what I want to implement here as well.  Where do you store the connection string (UDL)?  And how do you encrypt/decrypt it?

I don't want the developer to know at all what the password is.