Linked Servers: a Peek Behind the Curtain


We recently received a support call from a Gallium Data user. He was executing queries on his instance of SQL Server, but these queries were getting mysteriously changed, which caused his logic in Gallium Data to not run as expected. What was going on?

Enter Linked Servers

This issue was caused by the use of of linked servers. This is a powerful feature of SQL Server that allows you to stitch multiple databases together (not just SQL Servers) and run queries that span multiple database servers, thus creating a distributed database.

To create a linked server, you run the sp_addlinkedserver