His post is a bit misleading - Vusi, when you say "sync" do you mean synchronise a local copy of data with a remote copy? Or do you mean pull down the latest copy of the data and present it to the user? Look at the Windows Mobile SDK and learn a bit about using ADO.NET on WM devices.
ADO.NET's Sync framework is probably a better option for mobile devices (especially in SA), as it allows you to synchronise local and remote data using SQL CE. Changes in the local copy or in the remote copy are synchronised on the next connect request, conflict resolution has to be configured on the object.
Are you even developing for WM devices? I mean, you could be developing for BlackBerry, and asking how to access a remote SQL server. Waaaaay too much ambiguity here.
With regards to rendering websites, any site that is Strict XHTML 1.1 compliant will *GENERALLY* render with modern phones. Most modern mobile browsers are XHTML 1.1 compliant. Note: XHTML compliance does NOT imply CSS compliance, so you will probably lose CSS style information on the phone. Many sites specifically keep their style data in CSS files for this reason: on a desktop or on a decent mobile browser like Opera Mini or IE Mobile they render perfectly...on a phone with a slimmed down mobile browser (think Nokia Series 40 devices) it renders the text and non-CSS-linked pictures, allowing a cleaner, black-on-white page for such devices.
And so the kief looked and lo, it was kief.