Beginning Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ... - S3 Tech Training

Creating a Database Using the Management Studio
If you run the SQL Server Management Studio and expand the Databases node, you should see something
like Figure 5-1.
Figure 5-1
Chapter 5: Creating and Altering Tables
If you look closely at this screenshot, you’ll see that my Accounting database is still showing even though
we just dropped it in the previous example. You may or may not wind up seeing this, depending on
whether you already had the Management Studio open when you dropped the database or you opened it
after you dropped the database in the Query window.
Why the difference? Well, in earlier versions of SQL Server, the tools that are now the Management
Studio refreshed information such as the available databases regularly. Now it updates only when it
knows it has a reason to (for example, you deleted something by using the Management Studio Object
Explorer instead of a Query window, or perhaps you explicitly chose to refresh). The reason for the
change was performance. The old 6.5 Enterprise Manager used to be a slug performance-wise because it
was constantly making round trips to “poll” the server. The newer approach performs much better, but
doesn’t necessarily have the most up-to-date information.
The bottom line on this is that, if you see something in the Management Studio that you don’t expect to,
try pressing F5 (refresh), and it should update things for you.
Now try right-clicking on the Databases node, and choose the New Database option.
This will pull up the Database Properties dialog box, and allow you to fill in the information on how you
want your database created. We’ll use the same choices that we did when we created the Accounting
database at the beginning of the chapter. First comes the basic name and size info, as shown in Figure 5-2.
First, the name — this is pretty basic. We called it Accounting before, and, because we deleted the first
one we created, there’s no reason not to call it that again.
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