Chapter 15. Working with Heterogeneous Environments: Setting Up Linked Servers

Chapter 14, "Transferring Data to and from SQL Server," introduced the idea of transferring data between different databases, servers, or platforms. In this chapter, you will practice with SQL Server 2000 features that enable you to execute queries that span multiple servers.

In some cases, you might want to access data that is not stored in SQL Server, that perhaps is not even relational. As long as you have an ODBC driver or an OLE DB provider to connect to this particular data, you can use linked servers, or rowset functions, to access this data from any Transact-SQL batch, stored procedure, trigger, or user-defined function.

This chapter teaches you the following:

• What distributed queries are and why you might need them

• How to use Transact-SQL rowset functions to execute queries in remote servers

• How to define linked servers

• How to execute queries using linked servers

• How to run queries that are executed remotely in a remote server

• How to design and use partitioned views