Great question, it taught me something new today, thank you Paul! I got it wrong because I believed that log backups will be smaller (did not even notice a lot...

Wayne already provided an excellent solution in the post above. Here is the alternative utilizing the filtering you need based on the having predicate. I will have to start with...

There is no way I can possible dislike when my post is commented by you Jeff. When I wrote that I liked that you picked on my post, I actually...

Jeff Moden (6/4/2010)

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So, yeah... what you did actually was terribly wrong... The OP asked for a drink and you handed him a glass of high fructose corn syrup and...

Rick Lang (6/7/2010)

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I'm missing something here. I get the same answer if I don't include the HAVING clause, so I'm not picking up on the value added of the...

This is a very cool question, thank you Hugo. In addition to requiring some brain racking to understand and answer it correctly, it is also the best example I have...

I found the solution to your problem on MSDN blogs site. It really makes sense (as all these problems do in the end). The bottom line is that the source...

And the ad hoc distributed queries option is set to 1 right?

sp_configure 'Ad Hoc Distributed Queries';

shows 1 in both config_value and run_value columns?

Oleg

Did you try to run the text file, just to make sure that there is nothing wrong with openrowset queries?

declare @contents varchar(max);

select @contents = f.BulkColumn

...

Jeff Moden (6/3/2010)

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Only having a couple of rows should never be justification for doing it wrong because the number of rows can change even if it's by someone borrowing the...

I was trying to say that Excel file...

For sanity check you can still try checking for locks though. I don't know which process you have in place to write Excel files, but in theory what is possible...

I was able to reproduce the error you are getting. Here are the steps:

Create the xls file on the server (C:\Useless\sample.xls)

Run the script to get the data:

select *

from openrowset

(...

May be what I am trying to suggest is dumb, please forgive me if it is. Does the aforementioned xls file exists in C:\Mraf folder where C: is the server...

Whenever you need to execute a set based update which modifies data in the linked server table, the MSDTC will execute your updates row-by-row despite the fact that your statement...