Best practice: handling errors in linked servers

Question

I am using SQL Server 2008 R2 to connect to a number of other servers of the same type from within triggers and stored procedures. These servers are geographically distributed around the world and it is vital that any errors in communication between the servers are logged along with the data that was supposed to be sent so the communication may be re-attempted at a later time. The servers are participating in an Observer pattern with one of the servers acting as the observer and handling routing of messages between the other servers.

I am looking for specific advice on how best to handle errors in this situation, particularly connectivity errors and any potential pitfalls to look out for when performing queries on remote servers.

Answer 1

Linked servers may not be the best solution for the model you're trying to implement, since the resilience you require is very difficult to achieve in the case of a linked server communication failure.

The fundamental problem is that in the case of a linked server communication failure the database engine raises an error with a severity of 20, which is high enough to abort the currently executing batch - bypassing any error handling code in the batch (for example TRY...CATCH).

SQL 2005 and later include the procedure sp_testlinkedserver which enable the availability of the linked server to be tested before attempting to execute commands - however, this doesn't get around problems created by communication errors encountered during a command.

There are a couple of more robust options you could consider. One is the Service Broker, which provides an asynchronous message queuing model. This isn't a perfect fit for the observer pattern but the activation feature provides a means to implement push-notifications from a central point. Since you mention messaging, the conversation model employed by Service Broker might suit your aims.

The other option is transactional replication; this might be more suitable if the data flow is purely from the central server to the observers.

Answer 2

If you are using the Linked Server and sending the data to the other server over linked server connection, there is no inherent way to log these request, unless you add an application logic to do so.

with a linked server, if one of the server goes down then there will be an error thrown in the application logic, i.e. in your case the stored procedure or the trigger will fail, saying the server does not exist or the server is down.

In order to avoid this, we try to use the Service Broker, where it implements the Queue Logic, in this case you can always keep the logging and also ensure that the messages will be delivered irrespective of the server down times ( in case of server down time, the message waits until it is read).

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms166104%28v=sql.105%29.aspx

Hope this helps