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Hi. I'd like to just quickly show you how to determine what versions of SQL Server you
have on your machine. In the control panel, you can always type
in "SQL Server" in the search box. And you can get a list of the different SQL
Server installations. But this isn't entirely the whole story.
What I'd like to do instead, once you know that you have some type of SQL Server on your
machine, is go to the "Start Menu", click "All Programs",
go to "SQL Server 2008 R2". Then open up "Configuration Tools", and launch
the "SQL Server Configuration Manager". When the SQL Server Configuration Manager
comes up, sort by "Service Type". And look for service types of "SQL Server".
I've got two here. One is SQL Server (SQLEXPRESS). And the other is SQL Server (MSSQLSERVER).
These are both SQL Server instances. The MSSQLSERVER one is the default instance.
And the SQLEXPRESS one is the named instance. To see what versions they are you can right-click
on them, select "Properties", go to "Advanced", and scroll down.
You can see here that it is 10.50, which is SQL Server 2008 R2. And it's the Data Center
edition. So that's my default instance. I'd like to
show you one more way of looking at the version. Once you know what your instances are (in
this case I've got two instances), you can go to SQL Server Management Studio
and actually check the version from there. So I'm going to go to the "Start Menu", "All
Programs", "SQL Server 2008 R2", "SQL Server Management Studio".
I've go two instances. Let's connect to the default instance first.
I'll just click period. And the period means the default instance.
Click connect. And from the Object Explorer, I'm going to
also at the same time connect to the SQLEXPRESS instance.
So now the Object Explorer shows both the default instance and the SQLEXPRESS instance.
What I'm going to do is to run a quick query on each one of these to show the version number
from a query. So I'll select the default instance. Click
"New Query". And then type "SELECT @@VERSION". I'm going to press F5 to run the query. And
you can see it gives me a version string down here.
It's easier if I change the output to text, so I'm going to say, "Results to Text".
And then press F5. And we can here that it's the Data Center
edition, and it's Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 (RTM) edition.
This is the result that we get from the default instance.
Now I'm going to select the SQLEXPRESS instance. Click "New Query".
Type the same query in. Press F5.
And we can see here that it's Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (SP1) and the Express edition.
The main goal here is to understand what's on your machine and to know how to connect
to it and to have a few techniques for determining
what versions you have.