Solomon, in my experience the "SELECT * FROM Table1 to test that change" approach is very inefficient. Come to think of it, next month or next year you will have...

if you can do that in the connection string, then yes (just set it in the connect operation). Otherwise, not...

Most of the Fit fixtures you can run from Fitnesse can also be run by FitRunner.exe from the command line. You can run a DoFixture, ActionFixture, ColumnFixture, RowFixture, etc....