SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 Express

Question

Hi, we have a customer with a SQL Server 2005 instance and are planning to install an application that installs a SQL Server 2008 Express instance.

Are the two compatible? If they are is there anything to look out for?

 

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

The two can run side by side on the same machine without any major problems in most cases.  The only thing to look out for is if SQL Server Management Studio is needed, the one for 2008 should be installed and used to manage both 2005 and 2008 instances.  There are some DLL's that differ between the the two and versioning conflicts may occur depending on the last patch applied, if it was to 2008, the 2005 version could be wrong and vice versa.

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Jonathan Kehayias | Senior Consultant, SQLSkills.com
SQL Server MVP | Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server 2008
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Answer 2

I have had some issues in the past but they were so infrequent that I cannot say for sure if its some issue or some kind of misconfiguration on my machine ..We had one such issue so far on one of the clients server but nothing could be deduced and hence we did not rely the both 2005 and 2008 cannot not work together ..

But I would still suggest you to thoroughly BING or GOOGLE before deployment .May be you have some incorrect settings or something else that might trigger some issue ..Just wanted to be a bit more careful ...

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Abhay Chaudhary OCP 9i, MCTS/MCITP (SQL Server 2005, 2008, 2005 BI) ms-abhay.blogspot.com/

Answer 3

Brilliant, thanks guys