I didn't notice you mentioning running the surface config tool?  seems to get me tripped up a lot when I am setting up new test victims.  Without that - I...

Mel - I might be misunderstanding you, but unless the view, defined on the progress server, has the WHERE clause - everything's going to pull "over the wire", and the...

You probably want to read up on using XML PATH.  This allow you to specify a root node, and will give you a little more control over how the XMl...

Well - I've been on both sides of the fence, so there are arguments on both sides. 

I can't know what kind of e-mail you received, but I can profess...

Well - there's outsourced, and there's OUTSOURCED.  Our current DBA is a consultant (so it's outsourced), but he's on site most of the time.

My previous employer wanted to use DBA's...

I wasn't advocating XML being your final product, but it be the replacement for the temp table/working table you're building. 

One piece you haven't taken on yet is how to...

Also - given what you need to extract - you should consider if you couldn't make all of the "content" live in a single SQL table, with an identifier tacked...

Mel - not using the OPENQUERY syntax means the data is being pulled across the wire unprocessed, and you're having SQLSERVER doing the work.  OpenQuery should "delegate" the query execution...

By the way - I love the Gladiator creed as a DBA signature...reminds me of a few jobs I had...LOL

I noticed that too (the join syntax), but for some reason the parser prefers the subquery, and flags the "group by" predicate in an UPDATE statement as an error (but...

I think your XML markup got whacked - because I can't make out what the markup looks like.

What's the end-goal of looping through the XML values?  If it's only to...

Try that one:

UPDATE inv

SET inv.OnHand = inv.OnHand -

(SELECT sum(QuantityIssued)

FROM issue_dx

WHERE issue_dx.class = inv.class AND issue_dx.PartNumber = inv.PartNumber)

WHERE 

inv.PartNumber IN (SELECT PartNumber FROM issue_dx where inv.class=issue_dx.class )

The code you have seems very different from what you're describing as wanting to achieve.  That being said - if you hope to be able to export the scholarships/invoices out...

what kind of error are you getting?

You also want to make sure that the paths to external files/databases are set up to be visible *as you've defined* from the perspective of the user running SQLAgent.  Meaning...