Question

I am currently writing an application in VS2010 which will access many different SQL Servers spread out to a couple of servers on our network. This is however a dynamic environment, and the servers might be subject to decommissioning. I have a couple of entity data models which point to custom information-gathering databases in those servers, which will become useless to me when the servers decommission. The problem is that I am worried that if one of these servers decommission, my application would fail because the entity data models won’t be able to point to the databases anymore. I cannot go like every 2 weeks to change the source code of the application to meet new server needs, as development time would be wasted.

Are my suspicions right, that my application would fail to work if the data models point to databases which may not exist anymore? Is there a workaround to cater for my needs to “ignore” a connection to a non-existent database?

Answer 1

You will get an exception when you try to do the first thing which connects to the DB.

The exception will note that the underlying provider failed on open, and will have a SqlException as the InnerException giving details of that.

Probably the best thing for you to do is to manually create and open the connection and pass that to the context in the constructor, using this overload.