Introducing ASP.NET—Installing SQL Server Management Studio Express
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Installing SQL Server Management Studio Express
In order to use your SQL Server 2005 install effectively, you’ll need some sort of administration tool that will allow you to work with your databases. SQL Server Management Studio Express is a free tool provided by Microsoft to allow you to manage your installation of SQL Server 2005.
To install SQL Server Management Studio Express, follow these steps:
- 1. Navigate again to
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/, and click the Download Now link.
- 2. This time, download the SQL Server Management Studio Express edition that corresponds to the SQL Server 2005 version that you installed previously.
- 3. After the download completes, execute the file and follow the steps to install the product.
Once it’s installed, SQL Server Manager Express can be accessed from Start > All Programs > Microsoft SQL Server 2005 > SQL Server Management Studio Express. When executed, it will first ask for your credentials, as Figure 1.12, "Connecting to SQL Server" illustrates.
Figure 1.12. Connecting to SQL Server
By default, when installed, SQL Server 2005 Express Edition will only accept connections that use Windows Authentication, which means that you’ll use your Windows user account to log in to the SQL Server. Because you’re the user that installed SQL Server 2005, you’ll already have full privileges to the SQL Server. Click Connect to connect to your SQL Server 2005 instance.
Figure 1.13. Managing your database server
After you’re authenticated, you’ll be shown the interface in Figure 1.13, "Managing your database server", which gives you many ways to interact with, and manage, your SQL Server 2005 instance.
SQL Server Management Studio lets you browse through the objects inside your SQL Server, and even modify their settings. For example, you can change the security settings of your server by right-clicking the COMPUTER\SQLEXPRESS (where COMPUTER is the name of your computer), choosing Properties, and selecting Security from the panel, as shown in Figure 1.14, "Changing server settings with SQL Server Management Studio".
Figure 1.14. Changing server settings with SQL Server Management Studio
SQL Server and Instances
You can run multiple SQL Servers on the one computer simultaneously—each SQL Server is called an instance of SQL Server. How is this useful? Imagine you have a production server that runs two applications with two separate databases on the same instance of SQL Server. If, for some reason, we need to restart SQL Server for the first application, the second application’s database will become unavailable while the restart is taking place. If the second application’s database was operating on a second instance of SQL Server, we wouldn’t have such a problem—the second application would continue working without missing a beat.
Each instance of SQL Server requires a name. The default instance name for SQL Server 2005 Express Edition is SQLEXPRESS. When connecting to your database server, you must specify both the name of the computer and the name of the SQL Server instance in the form ComputerName/InstanceName. You can see this specification back in Figure 1.12, "Connecting to SQL Server" and Figure 1.13, "Managing your database server", where we’re connecting to an instance called SQLEXPRESS on a computer called VM2.
 
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