Visual Studio 2008 + Sql 2008 best practices

Question

The basic problem is that upon trying to uninstall the default SQL 2005 express and install SQL 2008, it is no longer connectable through either Visual studio or the Management Studio. I think at this point (as I have been meaning to for sometime) a reinstall of Windows will be quicker than a repair.

When I have Windows reinstalled, what edition of SQL 2008 would you install (nothing off limits, I have Technet and MSDN), and in what order would you proceed with the install?

Also, I was just wondering if I did something wrong - out of the box, the SQL that came with Visual Studio 2008 took up on average 20MB of memory. Upon installing SQL 2008 it is around 90MB. I knew that being x64 would be slightly more, but considering I only use it a few times a week, I thought this maybe is a bit to much and am considering just using a VM for doing this.

Lastly, as much as I use SQL 2008 for deployment of my projects, I have never really done anything very complex or had problems developing on 2005, should I just stick with 2005 until Visual Studio 2010 is out?

I spent a while looking in search for previous answers and found nothing - I thought someone would have of asked this before so if I missed it - sorry!

Answer 1

I do most of my local development in SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and it does the job pretty well, and it's the most lightweight edition you can get. I would stick to 2008 if I were you, due to the extra features which you may find yourself using eventually, plus the actual service itself doesn't seem to take up much extra memory over 2005 from what I can see.

The new intellisense features in Management Studio 2008 may be the cause of your extra memory usage, which can be turned off if you want.