How do you set up linked servers in your QA environment? You set them up the same as you do in the production environment, right? Why even ask? Correct. There is no difference in the actual steps of setting up a linked server between your QA and prod. However, consider the following typical code fragment involving a linked server:  SELECT ...

When you have some data on a SQL Server instance (say SQL01) and you want to move the data to another SQL Server instance (say SQL02) through openquery(), you can either push the data from SQL01, or pull the data from SQL02.   To push the data, you can run a SQL script like the following on SQL01, which is the source server:   -- The ...

In an earlier post, I highlighted that linked server security configuration can have a huge performance impact, and complained that this was not properly documented in SQL Server Books Online and filed a Connectitem for this. Good news is that in Books Online for SQL Server 2008 R2,  Microsoft has revised the documentation, and included the ...

Is it better to move data to procedures or move procedures to data?   The answer is, of course, “it depends.” Let’s consider a scenario where you have two SQL Server instances: ServerA and ServerB, and you have a procedure on ServerB (call it procB), but need to access data on ServerA.   Three database solutions are ...