Restrictions on dbservername

If you specify dbservername, it must satisfy the following restrictions.
  • If the database server that you specify is not online, you receive an error.
  • UNIX™: The database server that you specify in dbservername must match the name of a database server in the sqlhosts file.
  • Windows™: dbservername must match the name of a database server in the sqlhosts subkey in the registry. It is recommended that you use the setnet32 utility to update the registry.
Note: If the name of a database server is a delimited identifier, or if it includes uppercase letters, that database server cannot participate in cross-server distributed DML operations. (If the server name includes uppercase letters, it also cannot participate in cross-database distributed DML operations by SQL statements that specify the server name as a qualifier to a database name. These statements fail with error -908, because the SQL parser downshifts all uppercase letters in server names to lowercase characters.) To avoid this restriction, specify only undelimited names with no uppercase letters when you declare the name or the alias of a database server that will participate in distributed queries.