Friday, January 15, 2010

Sql Express instance is not in the list of network servers

Today, I have a requirement to work with SQL Server express. So, I setup a server with Sql server express installed and configured everything we needed. My team has 4 developers and everyone should access the sql server express to run the project. But, when they try to access the sql server express instance the server is not responding and always it results an error. When I open network servers, I found only the instances of my sql sever and in that list I didn't find the new sql server express I have setup on the server nb11. See the below screen.

image

So, This stop us working together and started finding what's the problem. I logged into nb11 machine and checked all the services related to Sql Server and found Sql Server Browser status is stopped. Because of this, it is not able to expose to external environment or outside of the server.

So, the solution is just start running the Sql server browser. Now, go to list of server in network servers and you started seeing the nb11 express instance there.

Now, the question is what is Sql Server Browser? Simple definition is "Provides SQL Server connection information to client computers."

Hope you like this post and please let me know, if you have any questions.

2 comments:

  1. you have to enable sql server browser in order to be able to access it

    it is possible that you have to set it up as:
    //server-name/SQLEXPRESS

    and after it should be ok maybe restart server

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  2. Hi cpo,
    first of all, yes, we need to enable sql server browser to access it remotely.

    SQLExpress creates default instance as servername\SQLExpress only.

    And not needed to restart the server at all as it is a simple service in the server.

    Let me know, what else you need.

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