Four-part Name Requirements for OLE DB Providers

Distributed queries can use four-part names only if the OLE DB provider supports:

• The IDBSchemaRowset interface.
• Restrictions on all the name parts that it supports in the IDBSchemaRowset interface. Restrictions are a mechanism defined in OLE DB for specifying the search criteria for metadata queries using the OLE DB schema rowsets.
• The literals DBLITERAL_CATALOG_SEPARATOR, DBLITERAL_SCHEMA_SEPERATOR, and DBLITERAL_QUOTE in the IDBInfo interface. Microsoft® SQL Server™ uses defaults which may not work with providers that do not support these literals.

If an OLE DB provider does not meet these requirements, it can only be referenced using pass-through queries in the OPENROWSET function.