Hello.

How do you check if MSDE or SQL Server is installed on a computer?

If you mean to check to check to see which version you could do

select @@version

If you mean you don't know if SQL is on a machine you could use SQL Scan from here

http://microsoft.com/downloads/detai...displaylang=en

HTH

You can look in the registry for

HKLM/Software/Microsoft/MSSQLServer/MSSQLServer/
for the default instance
HKLM/Software/Microsoft/MSSQLServer/instname/MSSQLServer/
for named instances

See in sqlsrvr.exe exists.
See if master.mdf exists
See if the service exists.

None of this will tell if the installation works though - to do that you will need to connect.

Thanks for your replies.

What I meant is that I need to find a way to kow which one is installed (MSDE or SQL Server). I already know there's one. I just need to know which one they have.

I cannot really check if they have SQLServr.EXE since both MSDE and SQL Server has this.

I read about using SQLboot.DLL to determine the package type. However, from discussions I have found, it seems that said DLL is causing problems and might not even be present or has been deleted.

SELECT @@Version returns me the version as well as service packs installed. Do you know if the text it returns is always in English?

As side note, I'll be doing this inside VB and will be great if I can determine what the computer (either in local, LAN or thru InterNet) has.

Again, thanks for your time and replies.

You could run
DBCC CONCURRENCYVIOLATION
It will only return a resultset for msde and the personal edition.

Thanks. I used

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY ('EngineEdition') AS EngineEdition

This will return 1 if MSDE.

Again thanks =)