From the course: SQL Server 2008 Essential Training

Post-installation checks - SQL Server Tutorial

From the course: SQL Server 2008 Essential Training

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Post-installation checks

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So it'll be useful to prove to ourselves that we're actually have a database to deal with. So, how do we do that? Well, opening up our SQL Server programs there is a couple of things we can look at. If I'm really just interested in the different parts of SQL Server and how they're running, I could go to my Configuration Tools section and open up SQL Server Configuration Manager. Now what this will do is allow me to see those different components, which ones are running, which ones are not. In these SQL Server Services I'll see that I have the actual SQL Server engine running under the identity of SQLEngine. We've got an Analysis Services as running. The SQL Server Browser is not and that is by default it doesn't automatically start. Integration Services is running. The Agent is not running. It is stopped, because it's a manual start. The Full-text Filter Daemon is running and so is Reporting Services. This would be the screen where you could do things like configure whether they start up automatically or manually, start them or stop them, change the identity that they're running under. For us, we don't really need to touch any of that right now. The one other thing that you're likely to do is in the SQL Server Network Configuration, and you could have two entries for that depending on if you're 64 or 32 bit, it will tell you the protocols that were running. How can the other machines talk to us right now? By default we're going to have TCP/IP as Enabled. That's the default way people will connect to this machine. If I double-click it, it will tell me a few entries like is it enabled yes or no and what IP address is this on. By default the TCP port for SQL Server is 1433. That can be changed, but that's just what I've expect to see right now. But of course we're not looking at anything. It seems to say to us that we've got a lot of background services running, but what do we actually have. Well, to see that I'm going to go to the SQL Server management tool, which will be in Management Studio. So, opening up SQL Server Management Studio. What it's going to ask me to do is say, well, which database engine do you want to connect to? Because we could use this one program to connect to a database installed on our local machine, to one in our back office, even one that's out there over the web and in the cloud. Well, I just want to connect to the local machine. So I can accept the default server name, type in the name of the actual machine that it says, or even just put a single dot here and say Connect. What that means is yes, we're actually connected to this machine right now and I can expand over here my Databases section. That seems to say that I've got some System Databases and if I expand that I've got master and model and msdb and tempdb. We'll talk about those in a minute. Couple of other databases that are being used by the Reporting Services part, but that's about it. If you're expecting to find some sample data, well, you're not really going to, because SQL Server doesn't install any template databases or any samples for you to look at. But you can get that and we'll see how to get some data to look at in just a minute.

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