Question

Is there a difference? I am after the name of the server, even if it’s running on an instance.

Answer 1

HOST_NAME() is the name of the client. So if you retrieve the value from SSMS on your workstation it will be the name of your workstation, while if you run the command from SSMS on the server, it will be the name of the server.

Also if the server is clustered, do you want the virtual SQL Server name or the physical name of the currently active node? If the latter you’ll want:

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('ComputerNamePhysicalNetBIOS');