>All good points and I much rather prefer to do it in a "disconnected" (by a drop-file) mode. Thank you.

Drop file means you are in the same network, some times this is not acceptable (we are in that boat), we have many dataloggers that have this issue, we need the data but we cannot access to it directly. So we have four, that I remember in this moment, solutions: one way serial communications receiving 24/7 stream of data, Winsock (connecting to a propietary 3rd party oodb), SQL Server Replication (Push, as the route from us to production is blocked by the firewall) and FTP