How best to deploy database?

What would be the best way to deploy a database to customers?

Execute sql scripts to create the database on the customer's server, or distribute an .mdf file?

Package as msi?

Other ideas?

Hi,

if you vuild a database from sctach with only little data shipped with the database, I would go for the scripting. If you have more data you should do something like MSIing. If you don′t want to use an installer just ship the MDF file and leave it to the customer to attach the database.

HTH, jens Suessmeyer.

http://www.sqlserver2005.de|||

Hi Jens,

There is very little data in each newly deployed database. The customer uses an application front end to populate the database to their own specific requirements.

The applicationfront-end will be deployed via MSI as each customer will have multiple installations of it, each pointing at one or more database servers.

Having had little to do with MSI packages thus far is it easy to get an MSI to execute the scripts and/or attach a template MDF?

The way I see it, the database installer will execute under admin account on the server (same as account used to install SQL Server) so can connect using Windows Authentication. At that point I need to execute the setup scripts and/or attach the MDF. Further I need to execute scripts to generate a unique logon used as an application role per SQL Server instance so that the front-end application(s) can connect remotely.

Does this sound a reasonable way to go about it?

Many thanks for your input.

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That sounds good, I would offer the user a possibility to choose the instance where he wants to attach the database to (if more than one instance is present). Furtherone I would let him to choose to either connect to the server via SQL Server authentication or Windows authentication (because not all servers might have the local adminstrator group as sysadmins).

With that you should have a minimum of support calls :-) (If any problems occur, don′t forget to implement a logging mechanism which get the output of the executed script for debugging purposes)

HTH, Jens Suessmeyer.

http://www.sqlserver2005.de