Side note: you do NOT want to be in Montreal when they find out you've moved them to Ontario .....

Sometimes I get caught by this message when I try to connect to a server on which the SQL Server service has not been started, an easy thing to check,...

side note: we shouldn't really be doing "select *" to check for existence. If that's a LOONNNNGGGGG row there could be a lot of overhead to no...

Be sure to check licensing costs, too. Many org's find Oracle's license structure prohibitive.