What are federated database servers?
“Federated database servers” is a feature introduced in SQL Server 2000. A federation is a group of SQL Servers that cooperate to share the processing load of a system. Federated database servers let you scale out a set of servers to support the processing needs of large systems and websites. Scaling out is the process of increasing the processing power of a system by adding one or more additional computers, or nodes, instead of beefing up the hardware of a single computer (Scaling up). Federated database servers can be implemented using “Distributed Partitioned Views” (DPV). You can partition tables horizontally across several servers, and define a distributed partitioned view on one server, covering all member server partitions. This view makes it appear as if a full copy of the original table is stored on one server. SQL Server 7.0 supports partitioned views too, but SQL Server 2000 came up with the following enhancements, that allow the views to scale out and form federations of da
