Gilles,

A Linked Server is "a persistant server object". You create it once with EM or sp_addlinkedserver. You can create a stored procedure that does all the processing and set it as a SQL Server Job. You've to check if ODBC driver for DBL database allow write access to the database through the linked server though.

>Thanks for your reply.
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>If I understand this, the application will have to issue an sp_addlinkedserver.
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>But I'd like to define a persistant server object. I'll give you a bit more info so you understand what I'm trying to do.
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>I have a DBL database that runs on a UNIX server (RDL2). I have a SQL Server 2000 (RDL1).
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>RDL1 has to be able to issue DML statements against the DBL database. I have installed the ODBC Drivers on RDL1 for that provider. Right now, I can access the data through a system DSN.
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>I will need to define a job (running in Sql Server) that will retrieve new data from 2 tables that resides on DBL (RDL2). It will transfer data from those tables into SQL Server tables, delete the remote rows, and sleep for a while.
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>How whould you "attack" this ?
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>Thanks