Apress - Accelerated SQL Server 2008 (2008) 02 | CHAPTER 2 SQL Server Installation and Configuration Those of us who have spent many years in product development might come to the conclusion that one of the least glamorous jobs is to design and code the installation and configuration of a product. This task is often contracted out to consultants so companies can keep their most talented developers happy working on the complex logic within the product. Alternatively a company can have great in-house people do the job but not hire enough staff or not fund that part of the project well enough to build a high-quality setup experience. The latter seems to be the case with previous versions of SQL Server. Microsoft has now realized that the first impression of the product is the setup and configuration experience. Microsoft has definitely invested in this experience in SQL Server 2008 and it shows. The experience of installation and configuration of SQL Server 2008 can be summarized in a single word pleasant. Not only is the user interface clean but there are also extra wizards that help you set up and configure the more complicated features like clustering. In general you will find SQL Server 2008 easy to install thanks to all the hard work that the setup team did in completely redesigning the experience for SQL Server 2008. If any Microsoft managers are reading this please give the members of the team a few hundred dollars bonus on their next review. This chapter covers the following topics Requirements for SQL Server 2008 Pre-upgrade tasks The Upgrade Advisor tool SQL Server 2008 installation SQL Server Requirements The minimum RAM required to run SQL Server is 512MB with 1GB recommended if you are planning to use SQL Server to handle larger workloads. For disk space you neeed 290MB. Disk space is cheap. Even if you are installing SQL Server on a desktop machine you probably have at least a few gigabytes free. If you are concerned that you don t have 290MB free to install just the database engine you probably have .
