What is the use of SYNONYM?

Question

What is the use of SYNONYM in SQL Server 2008?

Answer 1

Synonyms provide a great layer of abstraction, allowing us to use friendly and/or local names for verbosely named or remote tables, views, procedures and functions.

For Example

Consider you have the server1 and dbschema as ABC and table name as Employee and now you need to access the Employee table in your Server2 to perform a query operation.

So you have to use like Server1.ABC.Employee it exposes everything ServerName,SchemaName and TableName.

Instead of this you can create a synonym link Create Synonym EmpTable for Server1.ABC.Employee

So you can access like Select * from Peoples p1 inner join EmpTable emp where emp.Id=p1.ID

So it gives the advantages of Abstraction, Ease of change,scalability.

Later on if you want to change Servername or Schema or tablename, just you have to change the synonym alone and there is no need for you do search all and replace them.

If you used it than you will feel the real advantage of synonym. It can also combine with linked server and provide more advantages for developers.