Home Forums Article Discussions Article Discussions by Author Discuss content posted by Robert Virag When the reporting team needs an assist... RE: When the reporting team needs an assist...

  • October 21, 2013 at 7:06 am

    #1660125

    Ol'SureHand (10/21/2013)

    Curious about the decision to use linked servers for the purpose of extracting a bit of info perhaps once a day.

    Since these are all servers under your control, would it not be easier and lighter on resources to add a command to the nightly maintenance plan on each server to collect the info into a table per server, then have one go at collecting it into the "Central Repository" from your reporting application by connecting to each server ?

    I'm just a bit uneasy about linked servers, is all... would like to hear other opinions.

    Congratulations on a well documented article.

    Thanks for your comment.

    Yes, the approach you mentioned had crossed my mind as well.

    There were two main reasons that I chose to use a 'CentralSQLServer' /linked servers/:

    1. Our customer environments and reporting environment are separated, no direct connection between them.

    2. I wanted this solution to be as manageable and movable as possible. For example in case of the reporting team would inform me that they need some modification on the data that need to be collected. In this case I only need to modify the query on the 'CentralSQLServer'.