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: 
Queries involving semi-joins across a linked server tend not to be very efficient. You might be better off using [OPENQUERY](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa276848(SQL.80).aspx) to populate data into a local temporary table and then work on it from there.
Is there a possibility that you could set up a separate database on the server rather than using a linked server?