Beginner's Guide – Installing MSDE

These days, with the Windows interface, many people, especially people who are new to the programming world, have not had much experience with the Command Prompt. For those people, using the Command Prompt will be the hardest part of using MSDE, though, when broken down, really isn’t all that hard.

Here are the steps necessary for installing MSDE:

• Download SQL2kdesksp3.exe (unpacks to a folder - http://www.microsoft.com/sql/downloads/2000/sp3.asp)
• Run/unpack downloaded file to the folder of your choice. (hint: make it easy to get to from the command prompt)
• Open the Command Prompt (Start/Run/Cmd) – some of you may call it a DOS prompt, also.
• Navigate to the directory where the unpacked files reside (like “c:\sql2ksp3″)
• Hardest part: Run Setup.exe, with parameters *** (explained below)

***There are quite a few switches and parameters that the Setup program can accept, but for the most part, we are going to concentrate on just a few. In case you don’t know, an argument, in this case, is merely a set of instructions, passed to the Setup application, telling it how you’d like MSDE to be set up. For an entire list of parameters available, check out this MSDN article.

The three parameters we’ll be adressing here, are the Instancename (what we’ll call this instance of MSDE), the password given to the SA (System Admin) account, and the type of security you’d like to have for MSDE. If your’re unfamiliar with passing parameters to a program in the command prompt, it looks a lot like this:

c:\sql2Ksp3 >Setup.exe INSTANCENAME=db2000 SAPWD=yourpassword SECURITYMODE=sql

First off – “INSTANCENAME” – that’s what we’re naming this ‘instance’ of MSDE. (You can have multiple instances of MSDE running on your computer

).

Next, we’ll look at SAPWD. With this argument, we assign a password to the SA account. There is an argument allowing a Blank Password, but I’d highly recommend against that for obvious security reasons.

And lastly (remember, there are quite a few more – we’re just hitting the bare minimum here) – SECURITYMODE. Here, we assign the authentication method for accessing your MSDE Server. If you do not use SECURITYMODE=SQL, then, you will have only Window Authentication. It’s your choice, but we recommend SQL, since it’s considered a ‘mixed’ mode of authentication. In other words, you can use either Windows Authentication or explicit SQL Server authentication (uid and pwd).

So, at the command prompt, enter the line from above, and in no time at all, you can have your instance of MSDE installed on your local development computer.

One last thing to note, if it’s not accessible, at this point, try making sure your SQL Server Engine is running (Admin Tools/Services). In the Services list, it will look like MSSQL$DB2005.

When you access your instance of MSDE, you refer to it by COMPUTERNAME\MSDEINSTANCENAME. Therefore, if your computer name was ‘MyComputer’ and your instance of MSDE was titled ‘DB2005′, then, you would access the server like this:

MyComputer\DB2005

If you con’t know your computer name, just right-click on ‘My Computer’, choose Properties and then, click the Network Identification tab (Full Computer Name). Naturally, then, you’d use SA for the System Admin login, and the password you provided in the SAPWD parameter, during setup.

One extra note – Even though, technically, this is all you need to do to get MSDE running – - if you have already installed MSDE2000A (and not the SP3 version – - you should install SQL Server SP3 for security reasons. It includes fixes which address the issues raised by the Slammer worm. It’s downloadable here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=90DCD52C-0488-4E46-AFBF-ACACE5369FA3&displaylang=en#filelist. There are 3 files which are downloadable on that page – the one you’ll need to use is “SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine(MSDE)”

You’ll need to go back to a command prompt again (after you’ve downloaded and extracted the files for SP3). Go to the SP3 directory and use this command:

setup /upgradesp sqlrun INSTANCENAME= InstanceName SECURITYMODE=SQL UPGRADEUSER=SA UPGRADEPWD=YourSAPWD DISABLENETWORKPROTOCOLS=1

Not too hard, right? After all, we’ve done this command prompt thing before

Hopefully, by breaking down the setup in this manner, this tutorial will help you understand how to install MSDE, and how to access it in your code.

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