Question: At work we have two servers, one is running an application a lot of people use which has an SQL Server 2000 back end. I have been free to query this for a long time but can't add anything to it such as stored procedures or extra tables. 

This has lead to us having a second SQL Server linked to the first one and me building up a library of stored procedures that query data from both sides using linked server. Some of these queries are taking longer than what I would like. 

Can someone point me to some good articles about using linked servers? I am particularly interested in finding out what data is being transferred between the two as usually the majority of the sql statement could be performed remotely but I have the feeling it may be transferring the full tables, it is usually just a join to a small final table locally.

Also what do the linked server options do I currently have:

* Collation Compatible True
* Data Access True
* Rpc True
* Rpc Out True
* Use Remote Collation False
* Collation Name (Blank)
* Connection Timeout 0
* Query Timeout 0

**EDIT:**

Just thought I would update this post I used openqueries with dynamic parameters for a while to boost performance, thanks for the tip. However doing this can make queries more messy as you end up dealing with strings. finally this summer we upgraded SQL Server to 2008 and implemented live data mirroring. To be honest the open queries were approaching the speed of local queries for my tasks but the mirroring has certainly made the sql easier to deal with.

Answer: 
**Royal pain**

We used to have several linked servers at our shop and it turned out to be *such a PITA*.

First of all, there were severe performance problems similar to what you describe. I was shocked when i saw network I/O stats. Despite all efforts, we failed to hint SQL Server into reasonable behavior.

Another problem was that stored procs had these linked server names hardcoded everywhere, with no way to override them. So developers couldn't easily test on their development sandboxes any functionality that touched linked servers. This was a major obstacle for creating a universally usable unit-test suite.

In the end we ditched linked servers completely and moved data synchronization to web-services.
I would advise dynamic openqueries in a cursor loop instead of linked joins.
This is the only way i've been able to replicate MS Access' linked join performance (at least for single remote tables)  

Regular linked joins in ms sql are too inefficient by pulling everything specially in humongous tables.. 

-- I would like to know what is so bad about openqueries inside cursor loops? if done correctly, there are no locking issues.