When should database synonyms be used?

Question

I\'ve got the syntax down but I\'m wondering if somebody can provide an illustrative use case where database synonyms are very useful.

Answer 1

When you have database object names hard-coded within existing code.

Using synonyms might spare you the agony of rewriting old code, sometimes from multiple sources, which has its own ideas of the table or database names.

I have seen, for example, a code which was written for some production server. The coder has conveniently hard-coded the main table's name is test_data, which worked fine on his workstation. Using synonyms rather than rewriting his code got me home early.