| Recently I had a client who was making the move from WSS 3.0 to MOSS 2007 and wanted to migrate their intranet site collection to the new server. When I took a look at the WSS 3.0 server I realized that they had originally performed the Basic Installation, which is a single-server option that installs SQL Server Express Embedded Edition on the same box. The Basic Install is generally one you'll want to avoid for various reasons, but basically it limits your ability to scale-out at a later date and installs everything with the default options. After discovering that the Basic Installation had been performed on this server I realized I would need to connect to the Windows Internal Database, i.e. SQL Server Embedded Edition. You can use SQL Server Express Management Studio to connect to a named instance. In this case, the named instance is: MSSQL$MICROSOFT#SSEE. If you try to browse to this instance in Management Studio you won't find it. Instead you need to connect using the Named Pipe identity. You can find this in SQL Server Configuration Manager by right-clicking on the Named Pipes for the MICROSOFT#SSEE database instance, and selecting properties. In the Named Pipe Properties window you will see the Pipe Name listed. You can actually copy the Pipe Name from here and it can be used in Management Studio as the connection string for the database server. I simply copied and pasted and voila, I could connect without a problem. 
From there I was able to take a full backup of the content database and restore it to the MOSS 2007 server after matching service pack levels on both servers. Keep in mind that you won't be able to use the backup operation from stsadm command line when dealing with this database type. You will need to use the SQL backup operation in order to restore successfully. Once you've restored to an empty database on your new environment you can attach this to a new web application on your new server using the stsadm –o addcontentdb command. |