Specify configuration database settings

The configuration database is used to store configuration and site-mapping information for your server farm. There must be one configuration database for your server farm whether your server farm is one computer with everything on it, or several computers.

Database Settings

You must provide connectivity settings to an existing database server through an existing user account.

Database server

You must type the name for the computer running a supported version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 or Microsoft SQL Server 2008. You can type the name of the computer running SQL Server as either server or server\instance.

Database name

If you are creating a new configuration database, you can either type the name of the database for the configuration wizard to create, or you can type the name of a database that has been provisioned in advance. If you want to use an existing database you must run Psconfig.exe from the command line to connect to that database, and it must not contain any tables, stored procedures, or other objects.

If you are connecting to an existing configuration database, you can click Retrieve Database Names. The configuration databases that exist on the computer running SQL Server will be returned, and you can choose the appropriate configuration database.

Database access account

You must enter the credentials for an existing user account that will always be used to connect to the configuration database. If the configuration database is hosted on a different computer, you must provide the credentials for a domain account.

Although you can enter either a local or a domain account in installations in which you are using a SQL Server installation, a local account will work only for single server deployments. We recommend that you use a domain account so that you preserve the flexibility to later add additional computers to the farm.

To deploy SharePoint products in a server farm environment, you will need a unique domain user account that you can specify as the SharePoint service account. This user account is used to access the configuration database. The database access account will be used for both initial database configuration, and ongoing connections from servers in this farm to the databases.

 Important   Ensure that your domain does not have group policy that prohibits the account chosen as your database access account from running as a service.

The database access account must have the following permissions: security administrator, database creator, and database owner (DBO) of all SharePoint databases. If you run Psconfig.exe from the command line to install and specify the account using SQL authentication, then permissions for this account must be configured in SQL Server; the configuration wizard does not perform this configuration when you run Psconfig.exe from the command line with the SQL authentication option.

The account that you specify for database access must have, at minimum:

• The ability to read from and write to the configuration database.
• Server-wide permissions (security administrator) in SQL Server.
• During creation and adding schema, the account must have DBO permissions.

Additionally, if the configuration wizard is creating a new configuration database, the database access account must have the following permissions:

• Create Database
• Create Procedure

Tasks

To create the configuration database, the configuration wizard performs the following tasks:

1. Validate that SQL Server meets minimum requirements.
2. Either create a new database or connect to an existing blank database.
3. Add database schema to a new configuration database.
4. Add current server to the topology.
5. Add database access account credentials to the configuration database.
6. Write database connection string to the registry on the local computer.

To disconnect from a configuration database, the configuration wizard performs the following tasks:

1. Remove the configuration database connection string.
2. Stop the job/task scheduling NT service running on the local computer.
3. Remove computer-specific data from the old configuration database.