Linked Sources in SharePoint

Here in this post I will be talking on Linked Sources in SharePoint. To begin with I will give a brief introduction on different data source library.

In SharePoint there is a repository for all the data sources known as Data Source Library. It’s a location where we can manage and access different data sources. All the data sources present here can be accessed using SharePoint Designer.

Given below are the lists of data sources available.
1. SharePoint Lists: All the lists in a SharePoint site reside here.
2. SharePoint Libraries: Consist of libraries across the SharePoint Site.
3. Database Connections: database for all the SharePoint Site.
4. XML Files: Files used across SharePoint.
5. Server Side Scripts: like RSS
6. XML Web services.
7. BDC: Business Data Catalog, we can store different view.
8. Linked Sources: linked sources across SharePoint site

Linked sources are used when you want to aggregated data from different list i.e. joining or merging data from different list. You can achieve the following 2 things using linked sources.

1. Merge: in this you merge data from different list into a single data source.
2. Join: in this you perform a join between two lists which as a common filed between them.

Sahil Malik as written a very good article here which describes how to perform joins between lists.