I’ve been playing with SQL Server 2005 and like what I see so far. It’s especially nice for developers as everything now resides in VS 2005, whether you know it or not. (SQL Server Business Intelligence Development Studio and SQL Server Management Studio are really just the VS 2005 shell hosting the appropriate widgets.) One thing that I do miss from SQL Server 2000 is Service Manager for starting and stopping the various parts of SQL Server. (I don’t like to clutter my RAM with all the SQL Server bits when I’m not doing DB-related development.) You can start and stop SQL Server from the other tools, but I run as a non-admin and non-admins can’t start/stop services. (You could run SQL Server Management Studio as a local admin, but that’s rather heavyweight since all I want to do is start/stop the services.) The other option that I’ve been using is shelling out to an admin command prompt and typing “net start MsSqlServer” or “net stop MSSQL$SQLExpress” or similar.

Seems that Jasper Smith had the same problem and implemented a very nice Service Manager replacement called appropriately SQL 2005 Service Manager. It does everything the original did and a whole lot more that it should have. It supports all SQL Server 2000 and 2005 editions, including SQL Express instances. The list of services that you can manage includes SQL Server, SQL Agent, Analysis Services, Full Text Search, MSDTC, and Reporting Services. (My favourite is start/stopping Reporting Services, which the original never did.)

I even configured it to prompt for alternate credentials so I can run it as the local admin. (You can configure any shortcut to prompt you for credentials by Right-clicking the shortcut… Shortcut tab… Advanced… “Run with different credentials”.)

Very cool tool and highly recommended if you’re doing SQL Server 2005 development!