SQL Server Aliases

[James Beresford]

As part of a meeting on setting up DR systems, one of the Server Techs mentioned using SQL Server Aliases to allow the cubes to be identical in structure – right down to connections – yet live on separate environments and point at different SQL Servers. This was news to me, but a quick google turned this up: How to setup and use a SQL Server alias.

An Alias is an Operating System level setting that allows you give a friendly name to your Server – and you can then connect to the server using that friendly name. What this means is that as you migrate your code from environment to environment, if you use the same friendly name for your SQL Server in each tier of the deployment, you don’t have to change your connection strings.

It’s a neat trick (though i’m not sure how the names resolve if you use the same name in environments that can see each other) – it certainly requires some proper planning from an infrastructure point of view.



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