Assigning The DB and Repositories To Different Servers
Here's a couple of questions and answers from the newsgroup I thought some folks might find helpful:
Question:
After several years of working with XPE, I'm finally getting our IT department to put the database on a shared server instead of it being on my personal PC. So now it will be much safer (I already had to rebuild the whole thing after a hard-disk crash!). After our initial meeting, there were just a couple of questions that they had:
1) The documentation says to use "SQL 2000", but can a newer version be used?
2) Does the Repository share have to be on the same server with the SQL database? I suspect that it does because I couldn't find a place where this could be separately specified, but thought I'd ask.
Answers:
1) Yes, a newer SQL Database can be used, in fact it's preferred to use a newer SQL DB. For XPe development, I'm mostly using SQL Express 2005 today (along with Microsoft SQL Express Management Studio Express for easier management of the DB), though you could use SQL 2005 Standard or Enterprise as well.
2) There is a way to relocate the repositories to another share but since this is going to be shared out possibly with other users I'd recommend against it since it may become a management headache in the future if new users aren't given permissions at both locations.
What you can do is relocate the rep folder and its files to another machine accessible to all the users of the tools. Then from the DB server machine, use Database Manager's Repository tab to locate the \\<local machine>\share, you can edit this field (assuming you have admin privileges) to \\<remotemachine>\share.
If you want all future reps to be redirected to this other machine, be sure to update the 'Rep Root' field in Database Manager's Repository Tab.
Again, I'd recommend against separating the DB and Rep to different locations because of the potential management issues.