Mar 15th

Installing SQL 2005 on Windows 2008 R2

By greg_hess
You may have a need to install SQL Server 2005 on a new Windows 2008 R2 server (application doesn't support a higher version of SQL Server).  During the install you will receive a warning message pointing to IIS on the System Configuration Check.  Not only do you need to have IIS installed, but you also need several features that are not part of the default selection.  Microsoft has a KB article here listing the components you need to add.

Another area where you may receive a warning is the Windows Firewall.  You will need to configure the firewall to open up the proper ports.  A discussion of the ports is available here.  Microsoft has a KB article here that provides a script that you can use to open up the proper ports.

This can be come tricky when working with a named instance since SQL Server uses dynamic ports for those.  There are two different options for dealing with this, the method I have used is to configure a fixed port for the named instance.  Directions for doing that are here .
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Feb 24th

Web Services Part II

By lsk123

In my last post, I had given a brief overview of web services and it many components.

From my perspective, web services are very useful when provided by a database and it is a safe way to indirectly expose data to an external source without having to provide direct access to the data.
 
The following is a great article which describes how web services can be hosted by sql server 2005/2008 
 
http://www.developer.com/net/asp/article.php/3767311/Creating-Native-Web-Services-in-SQL-Server.htm

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Jan 3rd

SQL Server Full Text Indexing

By lsk123

My current project requires searching for key words across PDF documents and so I spent some time researching on indexing and searching.

 Most of  the data that I needed to search on is stored in Text and BLOB columns. The site below was particularly helpful in understanding the use of iFilters and how to install iFilters for Adobe.

http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/learn-sql-server/sql-server-full-text-search-language-features/

Another web blog I found helpful in gaining additional theoretical knowledge on various  kinds of indexes is show below.

SQL Server Storage Internals Part 5 - Properties of Clustered and Non Clustered Index pages.

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Dec 7th

SQL Server Versions

By greg_hess
From time to time I need to look up a version number to see what service pack and cumulative update a SQL Server is at.  A quick Google query brings up the a Microsoft page that has information to the service pack level.  However, I findhttp://www.sqlteam.com/article/sql-server-versions to be a more exhaustive list of versions.
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