[thelist] MSDE management

[Ron Thigpen]

(resend, never showed for me.  apologies if you get this twice.)

Ed Courtenay wrote: > Correct me if I'm wrong - but MSDE *is* 
essentially a runtime MSSQL

No need for a correction, you're right on the money.  To quote 
Microsoft, "[MSDE] Is fully compatible with Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and 
SQL Server technologies."

The MSDE engine is simply a scale-constrained version of the SQL7 
engine.   As far as I can tell from the documentation, the only 
limitations imposed are a database size limit of 2GB and a tuning for 
best performance with 5 or fewer concurrent connections.  There is no 
indication of precisely what this tuning consists of.  There also 
appears to be no hard limit on connections, just the expectation that 
performance could be expected to suffer at some point above this.

Once installed the MSDE server runs as a service under WinNT or 2000. It 
shows up as "MSSQL Server" in the services list.  It will run on 
Win95/98 but will lack some features.  MSDE databases can be designed 
and administered using SQL Enterprise Manager (installed choosing the 
"client tools" option) or Access 2000.

Once MSDE is installed, it is available as the engine for Access 2000. 
New databases are created as new Access Projects.  This results in 
non-data objects (Queries, Reports, Forms, etc.) residing in the Access 
project file, while the data itself is hosted by the MSDE engine.  What 
you end up with are user-friendly workgroup data apps, using the 
familiar Access interface, but with the data stored in a much more 
robust, manageable, and ultimately very scalable engine.  When needs 
grow beyond the MSDE engine, the data can be migrated to a full scale 
SQL server and the the Access app can be linked to that datasource 
without requiring modification.

MSDE has SQL7's full internal security model, and supports Windows 
security integation.

MSDE works very well as a part of my web application development 
environment.  My data is eventually hosted on a remote SQL7 server.  I 
can host a local MSDE server that is completely under my control.  I 
develop using the SQL7 Enterprise Manager tool.  When the time is right, 
it is trivial to load that db into a full scale SQL7 server for 
integration, testing and deployment.  It is also simple to move 
production data back to my local server for maintennance and iterative 
development.

All in all, this is an enormous upgrade for Access users who had been 
constrained by the limits of the Jet database engine.  It is also very 
useful for organizations using SQL7 that do distributed development.  If 
there is any inkling that a database might eventually be upsized to SQL 
server, developing in MSDE can be an excellent choice.

Apologies if this sounds like an advertisement, but I've been very 
pleased with MSDE.  MS has not gone out of it's way to advertise this 
engine, and I find that many developers aren't fully aware of what it 
is, and how they might use it.  In fact, in many instances it is a very 
low cost, fully functional alternative to a SQL server implementation. 
In my case, I get more control over anther component of my development 
platform.

More information from MS, including licensing, costs, and installation 
(watch wrap): 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?URL=/library/backgrnd/html/msdeforvs.htm

As to Norman's original question... I believe you will need the 
Enterprise Manager app to restore from a db backup file.

--rt

Norman Beresford wrote: ...it only includes instructions on adding it 
through SQL Server Enterprise Manager, and for the life of me I can't 
find this mentioned in the MSDE documentation anywhere.