Configure and start the server - SQL Server Tutorial

- [Instructor] As soon as SQL Server is installed, it's automatically started and running in the background on your computer. However, you won't see any indication of its presence on your Windows taskbar or in your notification area. In its default configuration, SQL Server starts automatically when the computer boots up so that it can listen for incoming connecting requests and be ready to retrieve or write data to the databases that it contains. In order to manage the settings or stop and start the server, we'll need to use a program called SQL Server Configuration Manager. Now I have Configuration Manager already pinned to my Start bar, so I'm going to go ahead and find it right there. The first time you start it, Windows might prompt you to allow the program to make changes to your system, so go ahead and say yes to this window here. Now, on the left-hand side of the screen, we'll see a number of items in organizing the settings available to us. At the top is SQL Server Services and this is the main area of interest to us right now. When you select it, you'll see three services in the second window to the right. If the columns are too narrow, just simply double-click on the dividing line between these column names and you'll see the full text underneath each column. The three services that we have are the server itself, a browser, and an agent. You can see under the State column that the server itself is the only one currently running. The other two are currently stopped. On the toolbar across the top of the window, we have buttons to start, pause, stop or restart the selected service. Occasionally, changing a setting will require that the SQL Server instance be stopped or restarted. This is one of the places that you can come to do that. To get more information about the server, simply right-click in the list here and go to Properties. In the Properties window, we have lots of different options that we can configure but at this point, it's probably best just to leave the default options in place, but you can page through the different tabs to get a feel for some of the things that are available to you. In the log-on tab that I'm on right now, we can control the state of the server. At the very bottom of the tab, we can see its current state. Right here, it says Service Status and it's currently running. And again, just like up on our toolbar, we have buttons to start, stop, pause and restart the service. On the Service tab, we have a property called Start Mode. You can see that mine is currently set to Automatic. This means that SQL Server will automatically start running when the computer is turned on, so that users can begin logging into the server to access the data. If we don't want SQL Server to start automatically, then we can simply change this property to either Disabled or Manual. In the Manual configuration, we'll need to remember to start the server each time we want to access the data within. I'm going to leave mine set to Automatic. Let's go ahead and simply press OK to dismiss the Properties window. The SQL Server Agent is currently stocked. We could access its properties in the same way. Simply right-click on it and choose Properties from the pop-up menu. The agent is used to automatically run administrative jobs such as performing scheduled backups or optimizations on the database without us having to initiate the process each time. I don't have any jobs defined yet so it's fine to leave the agent stopped for now. Let's go ahead and press cancel here. And finally, we have the SQL Server browser, which is another service that essentially listens to network traffic for incoming requests and returns information about the resources available on this instance of SQL Server. This allows remote users to log into the server to gain access to the data within. At this point, I'm not expecting any remote users to need to log into my instance, so I want to leave the browser stopped as well. Back in tree, we have two options for configuring client options. We have SQL Native Client 11 Configuration 32 bit, and then this one here for 64-bit machines. Inside of here, we have Client Protocols and Aliases that we can configure if needed and then back in the tree, we also have SQL Server Network Configuration for 32-bit installations which I don't have any of and then we also have SQL Server Network Configuration which will include our 64-bit installs which is the one that I have named MSSQL Server. Once again, we can right-click to get the properties of this protocol. The two options that we have here are the flags. Those to force encryption. Mine's currently set to No and we can also hide the instance which is also set to No for me right now. Let's go ahead and just leave these two defaults and press OK to get out of this window. So that's a quick tour of the SQL Server Configuration Manager. For our purposes, the default configuration's going to work out just fine, but as you develop your databases, your usage requirements and hardware configuration might require some adjustments. Most of the time, the Configuration Manager is simply going to be used for starting and stopping the server and to define whether the server will start automatically when the computer boots up.