Odd issue connecting to a named instance.

Hi everyone,

Please forgive me for the newbie question, I've done almost all of my DBA work on Oracle(on UNIX so I'm learning alot of AD stuff too) and am new to MS SQL Server.

I've got a SQL 2005 standard server that I'm trying to get to act as a publisher for a SQL 2005 Express instance, and I think I've narrowed down my problem to a connection issue.

(FYI, the Publisher works fine with another 2005 Standard server)

When I try to connect from the standard server to the express server using 'XYZ\SQLEXRESS' as my server name, it fails stating that it couldn't find the service, but I can connect just fine if I use 'XYZ' as the server name.

I think this is why I'm having trouble getting replication going as the replication wizard tells me that I have to connect via 'XYZ\SQLEXPRESS' in order to run the replication scripts.

Can anyone point me to the correct documentation to resolve this problem? Everything was easy-mode DBA work until we tried to add SQL Express to the mix, and I'm sort of running out of time on this one.

Thanks for any help!

The main thing to check is SQLExpress will default to local only connectivity mode. So if you are trying to access SQLExpress from a different machine this will not work unless you enable remote access. To do this run the SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration tool and select your instance and enable remote connections (then restart SQLExpress instance).

If everything is local, then I would suspect that the SQL Browser service is disabled. This service is used to locate named instances. So enable this service and start it and everything should start working.

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Ahh, I'm sorry I didn't clairify.

I've got network connections on the SQL Express machine enabled, and is setup on port 1433. I'm attempting to connect from a remote machine via the management tool for testing purposes. If I try to connect using 'XYZ' as my server, it works, but if I try to connect using 'XYZ\SQLEXPRESS', it fails. I can connect as ether if I am doing it locally on the SQL Express machine.

Thanks again!

EDIT: Hahaha! You gave me the answer anyways. I enabled the SQL browser, and it worked. :-)

Thanks for beign a life-saver.

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Ahh cool!