Had no troubles with ora oledb so far. Selecting 10000 rows works fine. Perhaps a mismatch in "case" with the CaSe sensiTive Oracle?

I still need to test against some linked...

Why don't you use the CASE-statement instead of decode?

sum (CASE WHEN ACTIVITY='X' OR ACTIVITY='Y' ... THEN 1 ELSE 0 END)

Also have a look an analytical functions for Oracle.

What is your current bottleneck? Cpu, I/O ...?

what oracle driver did you install on the sql server ? 9i, 10g, 11g?

No problem, as long a normal without adminrights can run the developed software (in most cases).

Any chance to trace on the oracle side the query mssql generates, to see if mssql actually passes the where clause or tries to pull the whole table.

Have a look at

Your way is much clearer than mine using the full oracleinstall.

They can do the same (both compiled to the same intermediate format). There are slight ide-features differences between both.

However most of our external programmers use C#

Have a look at

You will probably need various all_... or dba... views (all_constraints, all_indexes, ...).

For full Oracle DDL you'll need a tool that can use DBMS_METADATA. (only used Toad dba-module sofar)

Have a look at FAQ oracle backp.

Also read Oracle concepts documentation from the oraclewebsite.

Needs rman:

DBID of your database

Backup including controlfile & spfile

Backup of archivelogfiles

Extra "backup": consistent expdmp (not as sysdba)

Somewhere...

I'm not an expert in Active Directory. Better info is available elsewhere.

Depends on expected downtime. PDC has the largest impact

Check this link about when to seize the roles

More of it,...

Only when it is worked out and tested in detail.

From what I've read you have to be careful when changing/clearing keys (remnants in transactionlog?)

had to use a big file created by my own instead of sqlio creating it.

I find gsquared example confusing. Usually ; is end of sqlstatement. With all those ; where is the beginning and end?