In the course of some testing, I needed an installation of Recorder 6 on the new SQL Server 2005 (actually SQL Express Edition - the 2005 equivalent of MSDE). Thought it would be worth recording how it went.

Getting hold of SQL Express

This is free and available from the Microsoft web-site. An adavance on MSDE is that the database management tools (the equivalent of SQL 2000's Enterprise Manager) are also freely available.

First you need .NET 2.0 Framework installed before you can install SQL Express. You can get that (also free) from http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/ - (23Mb).

Then you can download and install SQL Express from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/download/ (55Mb).

Finally, you can download and install the management tools from the same page (34Mb).

Getting Recorder 6 using it

I started from a working, standalone installation of Recorder 6 using MSDE. The way I did it was:

1. detach the NBNData files from MSDE using Enterprise Manager and made a copy of the files somewhere safe,

2. unistalled the MSDE engine from the Windows Control Panel and deleted the original database path,

3. Next I went through installing .NET 2.0, SQL Express and its tools,

4. put the NBNData files where I wanted them (in \Recorder 6\Database\) and attached them to the SQL Express instance using the management tools obtained above,

5. changed the "Server Name" key in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Dorset Software\Recorder 6 in the registry to the name of the SQL Express server instance to which I had attached the database. I aslo changed the "Trusted Security" key in the same path to True (1).

When I fired up Rec6 (v6.8.1), it connected successfully and, so far, it has worked OK.

Warnings

1. All the usual warnings apply about messing with the system registry. Don't do this unless you are sure you know what you are doing and have backed up the registry first!

2. Recorder 6 has not been fully tested with SQL Express - so you probably shouldn't use it for critical data yet.

Pros:

SQL Express has a database size limit of 4Gb - (double the 2Gb of MSDE). Like MSDE, it can be seamlessly updated to a full version of SQL Server 2005 if size or number of concurrent users becomes limiting.

SQL Express has performance benefits over the older version. Import and export performance of Rec6 is reported to be markedly faster under 2005.

The database management tools for it are freely available. These have had an XP make-over, so they look quite nice (if you like XP's rounded, graduated styles!), but feel reasonably familiar if you have used Enterprise Manage.

Cons:

You need a pretty modern, high spec machine and oodles of disk space for all this stuff. The hardware and software requirements for SQL Express are detailed here

The .NET 2.0 framework is a fairly profound change and may affect existing software that uses the 1.0 or 1.1 Framework.

Stuart