by Anthony Wilko
If there’s one thing constant in the IT and hosting industries, it’s that technology is constantly evolving. For me, keeping up with it all has been nothing short of a challenge. When Microsoft SQL Server 2005 came out towards the end of 2005, and now SQL 2008, I pushed it to the side. It was just another thing I didn’t have time to learn. But as my customers started asking for it, I realized I had to bite the bullet and get it installed.
The problem is I knew that when I implemented MS SQL 2005 (and eventually 2008) in my hosted environment my customers would need help connecting to it. I had to find a simple way for my customers to easily access their SQL databases. Since I was already using MyLittleAdmin (MLA) for my MS SQL 2000 installation and my customers were happy with it, I naturally looked to myLittleTools who by now had created a version of MLA for MS SQL 2005.
I can hear you ask, why not save the money and let your customers use SQL Management Studio to access their MS SQL 2005 databases? As a host, it’s often difficult to recoup the costs on tools like this since they’re typically “value added” as part of the hosts offerings. Well, consider that opening up your firewall ports to allow direct access to your SQL Server via SQL Management Studio would make the server more vulnerable to DDoS , script kiddies, and viruses. Second, many hosted users have no experience with MS SQL, much less the management tools and how to find and install them. They just know the app they just bought and paid for is asking them to set up and configure a SQL Server database. Third, external access to a SQL Server costs money in terms of bandwidth. Customers will often tend to try and permanently connect their external web sites to your SQL Server which causes large spikes in external bandwidth usage and, as many of you may know, is hard to track back to an individual database.
A web-based tool like myLittleAdmin takes all of this out of the equation. You don’t need to open the SQL ports directly to the Internet since users are accessing their databases via the web interface over port 80 (or even better, port 443) and the interface, in turn, is communicating with the SQL Server behind the scenes. You can then lock your internal firewall policies down as necessary to control connectivity to your database even more.
But, you might also ask, what about the free MS SQL web-based management tools you can find out there? Well, the short answer is IF, and that’s a big IF, you can find a decent web administration product for MS SQL 2005, it’s probably going to be nowhere as complete as MLA.
So, that being said, let’s get started. This article is meant to provide you with a high level overview of MLA 2005 from a web hosting perspective and how it helps you provide very comprehensive control of your MS SQL 2005 using a web-based administrative interface. This review is no way fully comprehensive of MS SQL 2005 or MLA2005. There’s just too much to talk about and too little space to do it. But it should give you a good idea of what MLA 2005 is capable of and how well a fit it is for web hosts who need to offer their customers easy but robust access to their SQL 2005 databases.
InstallationInstallation in IIS 6.0 on a Windows 2003 Standard SP2 box, as you would expect, is straightforward. There is no executable to install. In fact, it goes in much like PHP installs. Just copy the files into a web accessible directory, enable the version of .NET you want to use on the site (MLA 2005 supports both .NET and .NET2), configure the MLA folder as an IIS application, edit the config XML file to setup the database connectivity, then browse to the web directory you installed MLA. Oh, and don’t forget to copy the license file to the root of MLA. That’s it!
The MLA installation documentation is very simple and spells this all out clearly so I won’t go step by step through the install process here. Just follow the install guide step by step and you won’t have any problems.
Where I did have an issue, and this was not related to MLA, was configuring MS SQL 2005 to allow remote connections. You need to ensure you do this or you’ll pull your hair out trying to figure out why MLA can’t talk to MS SQL 2005. The following KB article will get you set up right: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/914277
ConfigurationOnce MLA is installed and connecting to MS SQL 2005 correctly, you can configure the features that customers will have access to by modifying some XML configuration files. You can easily turn on or off features you want to offer, which in turn affects what the user will see in the MLA web interface.
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