Hi,

MS have exposed the functionality to use custom data providers in
Visual Studio 2005, I've used this and it works fine.

I would like to know if it's possible to use a custom data provider
from SSMS? I'm not even sure if SSMS uses a .net data provider under
the covers, - does anyone know?

If it does then does anyone know how SSMS gets a list of databases
from the connected instance?

Background:

We have a specialised solution which manages lots (1000's) of simple
databases (for example a questionaire) for clients built on top of SQL
2005. Each of these databases is a virtual database - they arn't real
databases in SQL 2005. The data for all the databases is stored
vertically in an EAV format in various tables. For convenience I use
my custom data provider to execute SQL against the flattened schema,
and it internally converts the sql using the schema for each "virtual"
database (stored as xml in SQL 2005) to the rather complicated SQL
required to access the real underlying tables.

Best Regards,

Daniel