I have only skimmed this thread; but, I started a similar one back in March on this and a couple of other boards. I opened a TAR with Oracle and reported about five different errors (by number) and a couple of unusual situations like two, three and four repetitions of fields in SQL made in the linked server. I jumped through weeks of hoops for Oracle only to find out that once the server was linked, that the way around the errors was to use Visual Studio to access the data. We worked with both MS and Oracle providers, and after much testing decided tht the MS providers (even though "not updated past version eight") worked better with our 2005 SP2 to Oracle10R2 connection... and that is what we went with in development, QC and production.

No. It's not "fast" and fortunately for us, the volumn isn't heavy. It does what it needs to do, and it does it well with no errors.

My advice would be to create the linked server and forget it in the SS Management Studio. Use a third party tool to access the data.