As a new member in Windows SharePoint team I am trying to learn as much as possible. I have installed SharePoint (WSS) version 3.0 on my home computer. I wanted to see what is the database schema in SharePoint. Since I had SQL Server 2008 installed on my machine I started SQL Server Management Studio.
But when I click Connect I only get the following error:
Bummer. After a while of searching on Internet I found the following Wikipedia article - Windows Internal Database. Let me quote some of the text from the article:
Windows Internal Database (codenamed WYukon, sometimes referred to as SQL Server Embedded Edition) is a variant of SQL Server Express 2005 that is included with Windows Server 2008, and is included with other free Microsoft products released after 2007 that require an SQL Server database backend. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Windows Server Update Services 3.0 both include Windows Internal Database, which can be used as an alternative to using a retail edition of SQL Server.
Ok, now I know that I am not connecting to a SQL Server database but instead to Windows Internal database. How do I do that? Again Wikipedia has the answer:
SQL Server Management Studio Express can be used to connect to an instance of Windows Internal Database using \\.\pipe\mssql$microsoft##ssee\sql\query as server name.
That means, that I should be able to connect even from SQL Server 2008 Management Studio.
That did the trick. I have now SQL Server Management Studio fully connected to the content database and I can execute queries against the database (I can use the same connection with SQL Profiler).
More information can be found at:
SharePoint
sharepoint, sqlserver