Please google for SQL Server Clustering with geo-clusters. It has few limitations / requisites & would be a costly solution.

Central Management Servers are not HA solutions.

If you don’t know the server name (Instance) then you can’t connect to SQL Server. This is how it is designed.

If the SQL Server Browser Services are not running on...

Can you please explain more on that? What exactly you have in your mind?

Please correct me if I am wrong, isn’t merge replication publishers & subscribers interchangeable and both servers can play both roles (primary & secondary).

May I know why you are not...

If you won't mind novice’s advise... http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms151224.aspx

I read complete thread but don’t find any good reason for splitting data into 3 servers. Did you assume it will improve performance? In a way yes because DML operations...

Please don’t blame SSIS for poor performance. It can be (& should be) optimized. As you already accepted you ended up with many unnecessary tasks with your approach which you...

SQL Server & Oracle (I believe DB2 as well) provide the functionality to auto generate the IDs (sequence numbers) which are heavily used by industry. You don’t need to write...

If it’s going to be one time execution, BCP / Bulk Insert approach is fine. If it has to be a regular scheduled task then I would recommend SSIS or...

I feel interim table is unnecessary here. We can simplify the relationship between person & address as one-to-many. With this we will lose the flexibility to map one address with...

I am not arguing on Paul’s capabilities (and your suggestion as well). I just wanted to say that OP is particularly looking for MS reference.

The following still holds good...

realyl need to find something from MS saying...

If this question is in continuation of two other (separate threads, on data type mismatch), then function won’t be a proper solution for you. But go ahead with function approach...

I don’t think Microsoft has documented all the best practices in MSDN. Most of the best practices are outcome of user experiences that are scattered on web in forms of...