Working on a project recently, we were faced with the challenge of deploying our ASP.Net application in multiple environments where although the SQL Server database we would be interacting with in each environment had the same structure, it’s name could be (and often was) different. This is a great use case for SQL Server Synonyms. Using synonyms, we were able to abstract the multi-part names of objects and have our sprocs and .Net code only worry about the names of the synonyms and let the synonyms change where they were looking for various database objects and unique database names in each environment we deployed.
Here’s a nice link to an overview of how they work.
