Try this with your appropriate primary key field name substitution. Not sure about your dbf suffix as it's been about 8 years since I touched dbase. SELECT TOP 5 SOURCE.* INTO DESTINATON FROM SOURCE LEFT JOIN DESTINATON on DESTINATON.PRIMARYKEY = SOURCE.PRIMARYKEY WHERE SOURCE.ZIP5 = '95003' AND DESTINATON.PRIMARYKEY IS NULL ORDER BY SOURCE.MAILED ASC Janya

This may not help much, but any chance there is a double or single quote in your string that SQL is seeing as a statement terminator, but that is getting stripped before we see your nice post? Janya

How do I use #temptable or @var functionality through openquery? There is a linked server from SQL Server 2000 to Sybase 12 using Sybase.ASEOLEDBProvider. Executing an openquery statement from MS SQL will retrieve Sybase data; however, I have no advanced functionality available. When I try to use temporary #tables or declare @vars it returns this error... Server: Msg 7357, Level 16, State 2, Line 1, Could not process object '…OLE DB error trace [Non-interface error: OLE DB provider unable to process object, since the object has no columnsProviderName='Sybase.ASEOLEDBProvider', Query=… Linked Server configuration: Provider options: AllowInProcess is checked Server options: Collation Compatible, Data Access, RPC and RPC Out are checked Does anyone have a suggestion or alternative for this functionality? Thank you very much for your input. Janya