As Arjan Sollie once described in his blog on the use of cross database scripts on Microsoft Azure, it is not possible to select data from different databases than the current active transaction database. To enable this, Microsoft SQL has a feature called ‘External Datasources’. With this enabled, a ‘fake table’ is created in the your database that points to it's external source database.
Unfortunately, we cannot model external data tables and sources in the Software Factory. It would be great if we could configure tables in the data model of the Software Factory which were ‘external tables’. When adding such a table, a datasource is mandatory. When we can model the external table, that means we can also create screens and model other settings in the subjects.
This is ideal when data needs to be maintained in a master data project for example, but can be used in other projects.
The implementation of the external tables should also be compatible with the mock data tables for unit testing.