Cross-database queries with different DB names in different environments?

Question

How would you handle cross database queries in different environments. For example, db1-development and db2-development, db1-production and db2-production.

If I wa

Answer 1

For this reason, it's not practical to use different names for development and production databases. Using the same db name on development, production, and optionally, acceptance/Q&A environments, makes your SQL code much easier to maintain.

However, if you really have to, you could get creative with views and dynamic SQL. For example, you put the actual data retrieval query inside a view, and then you select like this:

declare @environment varchar(10)
set @environment = 'db-dev' -- input parameter, comes from app layer

declare @sql varchar(8000)
set @sql = 'select * from ' + @environment + '.dbo.view'
execute(@sql)

But it's far from pretty...