Why isn't the ORDER BY operation evaluated remotely?

You can check the input to the operation, what the clause contains, and check data source restrictions to determine why the ORDER BY operator is not evaluated remotely.

Considerations:
  • Server options. How do the settings for the server options COLLATING_SEQUENCE and VARCHAR_NO_TRAILING_BLANKS affect where the predicate is evaluated?
  • Is the input to the ORDER BY operation evaluated remotely? If the answer is no, examine the input.
  • Does the ORDER BY clause contain a character expression? If yes, does the remote data source have a different collating sequence than the federated server collating sequence?
  • Does the data source have any restrictions on this operator? For example, is there a limited number of ORDER BY items? Does the data source restrict column specification to the ORDER BY list?