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Part I: Laying the Foundations
Server Groups
Within the Registered Servers tree, servers may be organized by server groups. This not
only organizes the servers, but enables new group actions as well.■ (^) Local Server Groups: Stores the connection information in the local fi le system.
Think of these as Management Studio groups. The tree in Registered Servers fl ows
from the service (i.e. Database Engine), to Local Server Groups, to Server Group
(if you’ve created any), and fi nally to the registered server itself. Registering
servers locally allows you to register servers using both Windows and SQL Server
authentication.
■ (^) Central Management Server: Central Management Server functions just like
Local Server Group registrations except that the connection information for
registered servers is stored in the msdb database of the designated Central
Management Server. The other notable difference is that server registrations
under a Central Management Server can only use Windows authentication to
register.
The server group (local or Central Management Servers) context menu includes the same
Object Explorer, Query Editor, and Policy commands as registered servers. When a query/
command/policy is executed at the root level of the registered servers, they apply to all
servers and groups below it. However, when these commands are executed from a specifi c
group, they apply only to all servers in the group or groups nested below the selected
group.
■ (^) Object Explorer: Opens Object Explorer and connects to every server in the Server
Group or groups nested below it.
■ (^) New Query: Opens a new query window with a connection to the group instead of a
connection to the server. T-SQL commands can then be submitted to every server simul-
taneously. The Query Editor merges (or “unions”) the results from every server and
adds two columns, server name and login, to indicate which server returned
each row as seen in Figure 5-4. The columns and whether results are merged or
returned in separate result sets can be confi gured in Tools ➪ Options ➪ Query
Results ➪ SQL Server ➪ MultiServer Results, or Query Editor context
menu ➪ Results ➪ MultiServer. Messages now include the server name and login
with each message.
■ Policy-Based Management Policies: May be applied to every server in the group or
groups.
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