SQL Server 2008 JOIN with Oracle 11g

Question

I have successfully linked an Oracle 11g database to SQL Server 2008. I can run a simple query in SQL Server which displays Oracle data:

SELECT PRODUCT_CODE
FROM [ORACLE-LINK]..ORACLE_SCHEMA.PRODUCTS_TABLE

This does exactly what I would expect it to do.

The problem comes when I try to do a simple join:

SELECT ProductName, [ORACLE-LINK]..ORACLE_SCHEMA.PRODUCTS_TABLE.PRODUCT_NAME
FROM SqlServer_table
INNER JOIN [ORACLE-LINK]..ORACLE_SCHEMA.PRODUCTS_TABLE
ON SqlServer_table.Product_ID=[ORACLE-LINK]..ORACLE_SCHEMA.PRODUCTS_TABLE.PRODUCT_CODE

This causes a 'The multi-part identifier could not be bound' error on the Oracle part of the JOIN statement. I know from research that the syntax has to be exact, and I think I've tried almost every permutation. Perhaps there's something in the SQL Server settings/registry...

Answer 1

Following @shiva's helpful suggestion I reformatted the query with aliases. This threw a server collation mismatch error, which proved much more illuminating than the 'The multi-part identifier' message I had been getting earlier. It turns out the joined columns had different collations (SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS vs Latin1_General_CI_AS). Adding a simple COLLATE to the end of the JOIN AS part of the query sorted this out.

Answer 2

Have you tried alias-ing the table names? Like so

SELECT SqlSvr.ProductName AS Sql_ProductName
    , Orcl.PRODUCT_NAME AS Orcl_ProductName
FROM SqlServer_table AS SqlSvr
  INNER JOIN [ORACLE-LINK]..ORACLE_SCHEMA.PRODUCTS_TABLE AS Orcl
  ON SqlSvr.Product_ID = Orcl.PRODUCT_CODE