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[Xinael]

The ones north of the floodgates that result from the channelling. They make that area pathable and sometimes idiot dwarves will try to get through there. I've had dwarves try to do it with magma channels before and end up setting themselves on fire.

[Gentlefish]

Why has no one mentioned the fact that diagonals kill water pressure, saving your fort from flooding while managing to leave the spice water flowing?

[StruckDown]

You can drain liquids off the map by smoothing a stone tile on the border of the map, then a fortification. Drain all of your water down to that exit for a drain that won't fill. You might also build the path out of all upward stairs, so trees don't clog it.

[laularukyrumo]

So nobody's mentioned aquifers yet.

Just good to mention that NONE of the suggested tactics work for aquifers. Unless you've got access from below, and even then, you have to exercise caution. As far as breaching an aquifer goes, you'll want to look at the wiki to get some knowledge on going through. Once you have an opening, it IS possible to strip-mine an entire aquifer, if you try hard enough. QuantumMenace's Double-Slit method can be used in adjacent locations, sharing a wall, and the shared walls deconstructed when you're done with that breach. It's innanely slow, but you can destroy an entire aquifer if you try hard enough. (Be warned that this will rape your FPS for various reasons. Still, if you have megaproject reasons, or say, metal veins (hemanite!), it's worth it.)

You can also drain water into a revealed aquifer tile and it will be absorbed. If the water is several levels below, you COULD use a pump stack to get the water up there, though as mentioned, draining down and sending water off map is recommended.

If all you want is a well, though, you can easily hook it up to an aquifer with no "draining" required--can stick it above the aquifer by just channeling down into it and building the well over, or you can build it below by digging out your breach chamber and then digging stairs upwards into the rock/soil from below. As long as the miner gets his act together and gets out of there, he should be mostly safe, since aquifer water isn't necessarily innately pressurized. Usually. Don't use your legendary miners for it, at least. I also recall a bug where dwarves can dig diagonally from underneath a bridge, which could be useful for breaching aquifers/rivers horizontally. It's commonly used to crack open magma vents since it's completely safe (as long as your bridge is magma safe and you didn't screw up and allow access into the area from outside the safe zone.)

[Starver]

Why has no one mentioned the fact that diagonals kill water pressure, saving your fort from flooding while managing to leave the spice water flowing?

I thought I had?  And, if I hadn't, it's been mentioned in the threads I first referenced.

Which is not to say you can't end up flooding your fort with depressurised water.  And when tapping from the side of a river you're taking water of the lowest (full-tile) pressure possible and, once you let it through the diagonals for long enough to trickle up to 7/7ths it's back to the 'original pressure', and you can still quite easily floor your fort with that water-source if you're careless enough.

"Draining an aquifer for a well", from OP?  Well, I'd personally just place a well or three over a dug-into aquifer slot.  Doing the same "for general purposes"... well, if it's for busting through to levels below there are a number of techniques already out there (check wiki on auifers, if you can't find on the forum?), and for getting a flow of water to go elsewhere I'd use the same technique as the aquifer-well but with then use a pump (or pumps) to lift it out of the hole you dig and send it where it needs to go[1] (also an unmentioned option for tapping, or with enough effort draining, your aboveground river).

The difference between an aquifer and a river is that the aquifer is "omnipotent", whereas it's possible to disrupt the flow upstream (e.g. mass draining through a floodgate array out to a sink) to get access to a pretty dry riverbed for either full blocking purposes or installing more sophisticated tapping techniques (once you let the flow continue again), the aquifer 'happens' from any exposed 'aquifering' block of rock that you haven't dug away (and, if you have, possibly its undug neighbours), regardless of works done elsewhere.  This can be a problem or irrelevant or handy even, depending on what you want (or don't want) from the area.

There's quite a lot of subtleties to each and every situation and need.  To repeat my last contribution: "Shucks, it all depends on what you want to do..."


[1] Yes, you can dig to its edge, on that level, and then 'tap it' like you do with a river (from side or channel from above), but the precise edge of the aquifer isn't always so easy to identify with the "damp rock" buffer", so you may need to be more careful.