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Hands-off install of MSDE

  • July 23, 2004 at 9:42 am

    #102123

    I am building a N-tier application that will be sold to certain independent business to run in-house. I will have little control over the server environment other than to specify minimum requirements and the set of OS's I will support (Win2K, Win2k3 Server, WinXP-Pro). The server may be already in use in the business for other purposes. Finally, the person doing the installs will often be a non-technical employee of the small business. And neither will there be a DBA or anyone else performing routine maintenance. The big issue for this post is that I will be using MSDE as an embedded DB in this application. The rest of the app is done in C#.Net with VS 2003.

    With this as background, I need to create an install which will among other things install MSDE reliably without asking anything unusual of the person doing the install.

    First question: So far the VS2003 Setup and Deployment capabilities seem to be adequate for my purposes. Will this run out of gas when I get to the MSDE installation part? Will I need something bigger like InstallShield or Wise?

    Second question: I would like to install MSDE as a named instance so I can establish the entire security scheme as well as other things. If there are no other instances of MSDE on a machine, can I install a named instance without also installing the default instance?

    Thanks in advance,

    Chiefley

  • July 23, 2004 at 9:57 am

    #515929

    setup.exe /qn sqlrun01.msi INSTANCENAME="MYMSDE" /l*v c:\msde2000_setup.log

  • July 23, 2004 at 1:59 pm

    #515963

    Allen,

    Thanks for the reply. Does this mean that I can install MSDE as a named instance even if there is not a default instance already on the system? That was my main concern.

    Chiefley

  • July 23, 2004 at 2:06 pm

    #515964

    Sure you can.

  • July 23, 2004 at 2:50 pm

    #515968

    You made my day. Thanks much. So from my installer class, I should be able to light off the setup.exe and then look for the install log to verify the install went ok. Its clear sailing from there. Thanks again.

    Chiefley

  • July 26, 2004 at 1:00 pm

    #516151

    the docs at MS are wrong. You CAN'T install MSDE as a default instance...

  • July 26, 2004 at 1:01 pm

    #516152

    Why Not?

  • August 4, 2004 at 12:45 pm

    #517698

    I don't know about earlier releases, but you CAN install MSDE Release A as either a default or name instance.  I do it all the time.  I don't know about the way the syntax works with an installer script, but I use the following, assuming you have executed MSDE2000A.exe and let it create and populate a folder named C:\MSDERelA:

    C:\MSDERelA\setup.exe SAPWD=<password> DISABLENETWORKPROTOCOLS=0 INSTANCENAME=MSSQLSERVER

    This will create a default instance even when a named instance is present.  The DisableNetworkProtocols argument is needed if you are installing to a Windows 2003 Server.  If you want to use some instance name other than the default, replace MSSQLServer with your name.

    Hope this helps.

    Don

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