Professional SQL Server™ 2005 Programming

Chapter 25. SMO: SQL Management Objects

It's been a long road, and we're getting closer and closer to the end of our walk through SQL Server. It is, of course, no coincidence that our chat about how to manage your SQL Server programmatically has been held until very close to the end. Among other things, we needed to have a solid idea as to what objects we were managing and what administrative needs we had before we were ready to understand the SMO object model and talk about some of the reasons we might want to use SMO.

So, what exactly is SMO? Well, as the title of this chapter implies, SMO is an object model for managing SQL Server. Whereas connectivity models like ADO are all about accessing data, SMO isall about access the structure and health of your system.

In this chapter, we'll look at:

• The convoluted history of SQL Server management object models

• The basics of the SQL SMO object model

• A simple SMO example project

As with many of the SQL Server topics we cover in this book, SQL SMO can and will be a book unto itself (indeed, there are several such books already on the market), so please do not expect to come out of this chapter an expert. That said, hopefully, you will have the fundamentals down oat least the point to where you know what's possible and how much work is likely to be involved. From there, you can look for sources of more information as necessary.