LESSON

Connecting to Microsoft SQL Server Express

Description

Learn about what Configuration settings and connection methods to use when connecting to a Microsoft SQL (MSSQL) Server Express database.

Video recorded using: Ignition 7.9

Transcript

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[00:00] Now we're going to take a look at installing SQL Server on your computer, specifically the SQL Server Express version. So I'm going to go ahead and open up my browser, and then I'll pop open a new tab here. And I want to go to microsoft.com/sql. And this'll take us to their page. And then under Products we can go to the SQL Server Editions section. And you can see that there's an Express link over on the right-hand side. And if you scroll down a little bit you can see our links to download SQL Server. Now, I already have this downloaded, so I'm just going to use mine. But it is important to note that we're going to need both the SQL Server Express and the Management Studio. So first off, I'm going to go to my Downloads folder where I have my SQL Express and my Management Studio. And I'm going to open up SQL Express. And up at the top here you can see that there's a new SQL Server Standalone Installation. This is what we want to do. Now SQL Server has a little bit lengthier install than some of the other ones, so we're going to be skipping through a couple of the loading screens. That way you don't get stuck staring at a computer screen that's doing nothing. All right, so we'll go ahead and say that we want to start installing SQL Server. And it's going to go and check for all the different products that it needs, and then we'll get onto the actual install. All right, so we're going to install the default set here. Just click Next. And here's where you can change your instance name. The default for SQL Express is SQLEXPRESS, but you could change that if you wanted to. If you already have SQL installed, it might be something completely different. The default for the full version is SQLSERVER. Now the SQL Server browser is something that you're going to want to turn on because it's used in a couple of the different authentication sections for Ignition connecting into SQL Server. Almost always you want it on, but your facility may need it to be disabled. You can talk to your IT guys about that. But we're going to set it to automatic. And here we can set the authentication mode. Windows authentication means it uses the normal Windows sign-in. Mixed mode means, in addition to that, you could also use SQL Server authentication, which will allow you to add user names and passwords into SQL Server itself. And this will allow for the SA user name, the super user account. So for that, I'm going to have to add a password. Doesn't matter what you put, so long as you write it down. And I'm going to go ahead and click Next. And I don't need to opt in. All right, so now that our installation is complete, I'm going to go ahead and hit Close here. And then we're going to close the installation center. So that's the actual SQL Server itself, so now we need to install the Management Studio. So I'll double-click on this guy to open it up. And it'll open up a very similar screen. All right, so we're going to go up to the top. New SQL Server standalone installation again. All right, now that it's checked to see that there's nothing else we need, go Next. So we're adding new installation of Management Studio. We'll accept their licensing terms. Now all we need is the Management Tools. I don't want them to pull information in error logs. And now it's going to start installing. So now that's done. And close this. And again, close the installer. So now we should be all done with it. Let's go ahead and open up our Management Studio. You can do that just from the little start button there. So we're going to connect. And then you can see in here we have our databases, the system databases. And you don't want to really mess with the master, model or MSDB. The tempdb is something you can play around with. The only caveat to that though, is the tempdb will clear itself every time you restart. So what we want to do is, we want to right-click and then say Create a New Database. So right-click on Databases, say New Database. And I'm going to call this guy Test. And now we have a test database. And that way we can connect to it later.

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