Question

To explain the need further, consider this scenario:

In a legacy system that relies heavily on TRIGGERS, we need to provide a token of some sort (let’s call it “SessionID”) to be inserted into some security log tables. This token is created in C# in the application server, and will be passed into all SQL commands.

SADLY, THIS REQUIREMENT ON TRIGGERS IS UNCHANGEABLE

So, because I have access to modify the connection string, I can (and have successfully proven that I can) use the “Application Name” token to provide this piece of information.

string connectionString = string.Format("SERVER=sql.example.com; "
    + "DATABASE=someDB; User ID=xyz; Password=123; Application Name={0}", sID);

Since this works, what’s the problem?

The problem is very simple… the above works, but since we have thousands of users… our connection-pool is destroyed (since connection pools are made based on the connection string… basically, I need the connection pool to be based on everything except the Application Name property).

So, do you know of how I can either:

1. Set a property in the connection string that will NOT be included in pooling.
2. Set a contextual property for this connection some other way that is not incredibly heavy on performance.

As a side-note… I could open the connection right away and create a temp table with a single value:

SELECT 12345 AS SessionID INTO #context

But that seems incredibly overkill!

Answer 1

You would need to execute this rather than rely on the connection string, but rather than a temp table SET CONTEXT_INFO / CONTEXT_INFO()can be used to associate some arbitrary data against the current session/connection (and is available in triggers).

If its acceptable for the server to create the variable from some combination of user/time etc you could assign CONTEXT_INFO automatically from within a logon trigger, in which case you would not need to change your connection mechanic at all.