Pulling data through a linked server is unlikely to be quick especially if you are joining remote tables to local tables. (Just use Profiler to watch what your local server sends to the remote server and I think that you'll be convinced.) Linked Servers are convenient and often "good enough", but not when you start blowing through your batch processing windows.
I have seen overall processing go faster by pulling the remote data into local (temporary or permanent) tables and then "doing the joins" locally to figure out what to put into the production tables.
If you have a large amount of data, I suggest looking into using a SSIS package or bcp and probably bringing the data into a local staging table first and converting the code to run off of local tables. This might involve a lot of surgery to your jobs since you need to have a job step (or steps) to run bcp code and/or packages.
If you are using SQL 2008 or better, MERGE should be available and it could provide more efficient operations. I am unsure if MERGE works with tables on a linked server and, if it does, performance may not be much better than what you have. So, you are still stuck getting the data onto the local server.
Also, you could look into partition switching, but I think would be the most costly thing to do in terms of time spent on getting things to work. You could view it as a learning experience.
Alternatively, you might consider increasing the query timeout, which is a server-level setting on the local server. That might help with the timeout error (until your data volume increases, then you would need to tweak it again), but I doubt that it will help with the TDS error problem.
If you want to minimize the length of time that your production tables are locked (due to the INSERT, not the SELECT with nolock), you would want to get all of the data from the ETL system onto the local box first, then go and insert it all. You want to avoid pulling data for one table, inserting that, pulling the data for the next table, inserting that, etc. (I'm presuming that you are doing all of this in a declared transaction that I'm not seeing.)
I found my answer at MS SQL Server Forum: SQL Server 2005 X64 Linked Server error
Turnes out I had "Level zero only" checked
So, it goes something like this: x64 Query > Linked Server to x86 > View > Linked Server to ADS
So, something like this now works...
SELECT * FROM OPENQUERY([HAL2011\SQLEXPRESS], 'SELECT PartNum, OnHand FROM [master].[dbo].[vHPQoH]')
Where [HAL2011\SQLEXPRESS] is the x86 Server with a view [vHPQoH] to a lined server pointing to the Sybase ADS.
But thanks to everyone for your help. I still learned a lot! This place is great!
Best Answer
Using SQLNCLI10 to create a linked server to SQL Server 2000 causes a fault. You can create an odbc connection than attach tables to your 2012 database. Then you build your treatments in SQL 2012 database as if the table was native. This is just a workaround that sometimes works. It's not recommended for large data transaction, like more that 7MM.