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.

Continues…