Adding Content Database with STSADM, but failing to connect to SQL Server

Question

I'm trying to add a content database to my MOSS 2007 site, but I can't seem to connect to the SQL Server. I run the following from the command prompt:

stsadm -o addcontentdb -url htt://testserver:101 -databasename WSS_ Content_MySite -databaseserver SHAREPOINT01

STASADM gives me this error: "An error occured while establishing a connection to the server. When connecting to SQL Server 2005, this failure may be caused be the fact that under the default settings SQL Server does not allow remote connections." Well my server certainly allows remote connections.

According the SQL Server Error log, there is no problem though.

Answer 1

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc261956.aspx#section1

This may be a ridiculous suggestion, but try -dn instead of databasename and -ds as well.

That's how it's listed in the docs, so maybe it's not liking that and going after your local server, where this already exists???

You would think it would throw an error if it didn't like the switch though.

Answer 2

So it turns out that the problem is in my parameters. When specifying the database server, I only mentioned the SQL instance name. The correct format is -databaseserver SERVER\INSTANCE where as I only have INSTANCE. After that, there was no problem!