Making an Entity Framework Model span multiple databases

Question

Is it valid to do something such as

CREATE SYNONYM [dbo].[MyTable] FOR [AnotherDatabase].dbo.[MyTable]

and then modify Entity Framework's edmx file to read this object like it would any other table?

I did a quick sample test and it seems to work fine for selecting and updating, but I wanted to know if there was any reason why I shouldn't be doing this

I am getting the table definition by creating an edmx file pointing to the 2nd database, building out the entities there, then copy/pasting the definition into the 1st database's edmx file.

UPDATE

If anyone is interested, I wrote up what I did to make an edmx file span mulitple databases here. It includes scripts for generating synonyms and merging edmx files.

Answer 1

If you made a test and it worked you probably showed something nobody else know about. Till now I always answered this type of question: It is not possible to use single model with two databases (with some more ugly workaround based on views hiding tables from the second database). Now I know two workarounds.

The only disadvantage of this approach is that all changes made manually to SSDL part of your EDMX are always lost if you run Update model from database. This means either manual development of EDMX (which is quite hard work) or using some tool / script which will add your changes after each update from database.