This article describes how to connect an M&M Central to Microsoft SQL Server instance.

Setting up the Database

Men & Mice requires that a blank database is created on the database server, with the collation SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS, and a login (Windows or SQL server authenticated) that has db_owner access to that database and an effective default schema of mmCentral.

The attached CreateDatabase.sql is a suggestion for the database and database server setup.  Please note that this script also configures the SQL server itself, which is unnecessary and undesirable in most cases. Therefore, review the script with your database administrator and only run appropriate parts of it. 
Before you run the script please go through the script and change the necessary entries accordingly. This includes path strings (default C:/Data) and very important also the password, which is set by default to "1234" in the script!

Subsequently the script will create:

• a user "mmSuiteDBUser" with the password that you have inserted in the script.
• an empty database with the name "mmsuite" and the following collation:
  

  COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS

For details please have a look into the CreateDatabase.sql script.

Configuring the connection parameters

If it's a dedicated server please don't forget to enable the TCP/IP protocol with the SQL Configuration Manager

Men&Mice Central running on Windows

1. Download the Men&Mice mmdbprefs.exe tool
2. Copy the mmdbprefs.exe into the data directory of the Men&Mice Central.
   Usually located in one of these locations: 
   • C:\Program Files\Men and Mice\Central\Data
   • C:\Program Files(x86)\Men and Mice\Central\Data
   • C:\ProgramData\Men and Mice\Central (Windows Server 2008 R2 and later)
3. Then start the mmdbprefs.exe tool by double-click. It will ask you a few questions

Choose database provider to use:

        1. SQLite
        2. MSSQL

For MS SQL Server please enter "2" and confirm with Enter.

Enter database server:
>

Please type in the database server in the following format:

<ip/dns name of SQL server><,port>\<Instance name>@<Database name>

For example:

192.168.2.12\INSTANCENAME@databasename
or
192.168.2.12,1433@databasename

Confirm your input by pressing the Enter key.

Enter database user name:
>

Type in the username, default in the script is "mmSuiteDBUser", that will be used to connect to your database instance on the specified SQL server. Then press Enter. If you let the database user name empty Windows Authentication will be used instead of a user based connection (this requires to run the M&M Central service under credentials that have access by Windows Authentication to the database).

Enter database password:
>

Finally you need to provide the password (it will not be displayed in the shell) and then press Enter.

Now the preferences.cfg file in the data directory contains beside the fingerprint of Central (i.e. the "password" XML-tag) four additional XML tags: database, databaseserver, databaseusername and databasepassword
The preferences.cfg file for normal user/password authentication should look like:

<password value="the fingerprint hash"/>
<database value="MSSQL"/>
<databaseserver value="<name or ip of the SQL server>\<name of instance, e.g. SQLEXPRESS>@,<name of database, e.g. mmsuite"/>
<databaseusername value="mmSuiteDBUser"/>
<databasepassword value="password hash"/>   

An example preferences.cfg file for the Windows Authentication method should look like (databaseusername tag must be present and the value attribute must be set to empty string):

<password value="the fingerprint hash"/>
<database value="MSSQL"/>
<databaseserver value="<name or ip of the SQL server>\<name of instance, e.g. SQLEXPRESS>@,<name of database, e.g. mmsuite"/>
<databaseusername value=""/>

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