Check if SQL server (any version) is installed?

Question

I need to find if SQL server is installed on a machine. It could be any version of SQL server (7, 2005,8, sql express etc). We need to know this information as we are writing an installer and need to show to the user that if SQL server has not been found, the installation cannot proceed.

I have seen versions that use the registry, wmi, SMO or simply just connect to SQL server instance (although would not help here as we do not know the server name).

We are using the Wix Installer.

What is the correct way to do this?

JD

Answer 1

A simple way to list all SQL Servers on the network is this:

using System.Data; using System.Data.Sql; using System;  ...  SqlDataSourceEnumerator sqldatasourceenumerator1 = SqlDataSourceEnumerator.Instance; DataTable datatable1 = sqldatasourceenumerator1.GetDataSources(); foreach (DataRow row in datatable1.Rows) {     Console.WriteLine("****************************************");     Console.WriteLine("Server Name:"+row["ServerName"]);     Console.WriteLine("Instance Name:"+row["InstanceName"]);     Console.WriteLine("Is Clustered:"+row["IsClustered"]);     Console.WriteLine("Version:"+row["Version"]);     Console.WriteLine("****************************************"); } 

Taken from this blog post.

Answer 2

Another simple alternative would be to use the following command line inside your installer:

sc queryex type= service | find "MSSQL" 

The command above simply lists the all the services containing the MSSQL part, listing named and default SQL Server instances. This command returns nothing if nothing is found. It returns something like this:

SERVICE_NAME: MSSQL$SQLEXPRESS 

Hope this helps.

Answer 3

I needed something similar, to discover a local SQLServer instance to perform automated tests against.

The SmoApplication was perfect for this requirement - my code looks like this:

public static string GetNameOfFirstAvailableSQLServerInstance()
{
    // Only search local instances - pass true to EnumAvailableSqlServers
    DataTable dataTable = SmoApplication.EnumAvailableSqlServers(true);
    DataRow firstRow = dataTable.Rows[0];
    string instanceName = (string)firstRow["Name"];
    return instanceName;
}