OLE DB Provider Interaction Phases

These operations are common to all distributed query execution scenarios:

• Connection establishment and property retrieval operations indicate how SQL Server connects to an OLE DB provider and what provider properties are used.
• Table name resolution and metadata retrieval operations indicate how SQL Server resolves the remote table name (which is specified in one of two ways, either a linked server based name or an ad hoc name) into the appropriate data object in the provider. This also includes the table metadata that SQL Server retrieves from the provider in order to compile and optimize a distributed query.
• Transaction management operations specify all transaction-related interaction with the OLE DB provider.
• Data type handling operations indicate how OLE DB data types are handled by SQL Server when it consumes data from or exports data to an OLE DB provider while processing a distributed query.
• Error handling operations indicate how SQL Server uses extended error information from the provider.
• Security operations specify how SQL Server security interacts with the provider’s security.