Even though you can't use full partitioning, I would think that partitioned views could help ... especially if the older data can be effectively held in "archive" tables on different...

A couple of things I'm considering : a CLR function to validate a hash, a CLR proc triggered from service broker to send a formatted TCP/IP message to a different...

I can't think of anything SQL-side. Something in the app may be hardcoded to use http (for example, a button or a server side transfer). Switching protocols may...

It really depends on what events will send the app back to the login screen, and how you handle errors. Ideally you will have some logging in the application...

I think you will want to change the tempdb collation to match your app DB's collation, otherwise you may have issues joining temp tables to app tables.

The functionality changed with SP2 I believe, so your home and work versions are probably out of sync.

You can change the location of the menu item, add it...

The summary page is now called Object Explorer Details, and can be accessed from the View menu.

Figured it out finally .... sp_dropserver and sp_addserver do the job.

I'd say that not getting an error when you insert a duplicate is the only downside.  If your application doesn't care about that then you should be fine.

You can always use xp_cmdshell to run a command line version of a compression program, I've used gzip in the past.  I'm sure there are a number of other ways...

Not to my knowledge, but you would have to use different tables and fields to be meaningful anyway as WHERE TABLE.FIELD = ('A' AND 'B' AND 'C') is never going...

I think Craig Freedman's blog is excellent ... http://blogs.msdn.com/craigfr/archive/2006/06/07/620903.aspx

I don't have AdventureWorks installed so I can't try it myself right now, but - does that result in different plans because the data is different?  And if so, doesn't...

As long as the connection string is identical, connection pooling will be applied.  How many connections do you see on the DB?  Is the application closing it's connections correctly?  If...

Are you sure the connections are due to pooling?