Well, looks like there has been some progress made, at least. I have downloaded your Execution Plan and can evaluate it sometime today. I have a couple of...

John,

I am very pleased with the Wrox books.

If you are work towards your MCITP: DBA certification, I would recommend picking up the Microsoft Press Training Kit, Set.

MCITP Self-Paced Training...

70-446 study resources are few and far between at the moment.

Transcender has a Prep Kit for the 70-446:

Cert-70-446

MSCert: PRO: Designing a Business Intelligence Infrastructure by Using Microsoft SQL Server 2005

UncleJimBob,

Thanks for posting your solution, I will tuck it away in my IE Favorites for future reference.

Regards,

Wyatt,

You have half way there, having your DSN configured, tested and working.

I agree that the labels for the Linked Server Syntax is confusing.

below I have syntax for connecting to my...

To Everyone that posted a comment about my QOD:

Thank You!

I appreciate the feedback. My goal of the QOD was to get people to look into the SQL...

I picked 2 items, which cover all three exams:

"Cert-70-431 MSCert: TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Implementation and Maintenance"

http://www.transcender.com/product.aspx?product_id=Cert-70-431&dept_id=102210

and the

"SQL 2005 Pak" (70-443 and 70-444)

http://www.transcender.com/product.aspx?product_id=Pak-SQL2K5&dept_id=102305

For my...

avinash repe,

One thing I forgot to mention in my really long posting. When you are performing your Tuning session, you will need to run your 18 minute query, so...

avinash repe,

Along with cbaker's recommendation about tempdb size tuning, there are two areas that should result in better performance times, with near immediate results:

1) Indexes: You will also need...

Kiran,

Thanks for posting that everything is working. See you around the Forums.

We have 2 RPG IV developers (on an DB2 iSeries legacy system) coming into the VB .Net world, as well as SQL Server. Getting them to use joins instead...

NightCrawler,

Your "Select @@version" query states that you have SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition, or at least part of an install.

At this point, I think it best that you consider removing...

Cory,

Just typing out my thoughts ...

From my perception of things, it seems that the 4 year degree, and the certification are most effective at getting your resume passed the...

hisham2778,

I am not familiar with DBISAM either, and Googling for information about a linked server against a DBISAM system didn't come up with any decent examples.

In order to be able...

ST,

XLS File on the server problem:

You cannot have the server access the outside world. Would it be possible to have some process "drop off" the XLS file onto a...