You can possbily use a passthrough query on the two linked tables, this runs the query on the database where the tables are located and simply passes the results back to you. If your query is running via VBA you can make a direct connection to the database in question and perform the query or if it is an application such as SQL server and the query is standard or simply changes a couple of parameters, write (or have the DBA for that DB write for a you) a stored procedure that you can pass the parameters to.
