Before we rush and use the myLittleAdmin tool, you will have to first download a copy of the tool. If you follow this link: myLittleAdmin, on the home page you are offered to register and get a free copy of the myLittleAdmin Lite Edition for free! You could test with this lite edition and then decide on purchasing a full copy!

There is an accompanying installation guide, so we will summarize the major steps required for a successful installation.

myLittleAdmin for SQL Server 2005 requires the following:

·         Microsoft Windows 2000, 2003 or XP Professional

·         Microsoft IIS 5.0 or higher

·         Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (Including Express edition)

·         Microsoft .NET framework 1.1 or 2.0

·         A web browser that supports XHTML and CSS2

Just a note here, the tool works only with SQL Server 2005 with all its flavors. If you would like to manage a SQL Server 2000, you need to download the myLittleAdmin for SQL Server 2000 which can be found here: myLittleAdmin for SQL Server 2000 and MSDE.

The older version of the myLittleAdmin was mainly written using ASP 3.0 however; the new myLittleAdmin is built purely in ASP.NET/C#.

Once you download the tool:

·         Open the *.zip* file and extract it to a folder on your hard disk.

·         Open IIS and make that extracted folder an application.

·         Copy the license file (license.config) into the root folder of the application.

If you want to run this application based on .NET 2.0, make sure to copy the DLLs from /bin/Framework2.0/ to /bin folder.

Now that the application is setup as wanted, we are still left with one additional and important configuration step! You need to tell this application to which SQL Server it should talk to and to do so, you need to open the *config.xml*, file located in the root folder, and updates the following section:

Listing 1

<sqlservers>
  <sqlserver address=".\SQLExpress" name="SQLExpress" />
</sqlservers>

As you can see we have registered this tool to work with the SQL Express instance installed on the local machine and we have given a name to this entry *SQLExpress*, it can be any other string.

There are a set of other configurations you can set through this file. The major one is the one we explained above, the others we will just mention them and leave it for you to read the installation guide to know how to configure them.

Add a new interface language in addition to English and Japanese presently set.

Add a new skin for the tool in addition to the default one currently present.

You can change the date display formats.

Another major section of the config file is specifying the backup/restore paths on your server:

Listing 2

<tools>
<backupwh
  backupfolder="\\Server\dbbackup\" 
  backupurl="http://mylittleadmin.host.com/dbbackup" 
/>
<restorewh
  uploadfolder="\\Server\dbupload\"
  deleteafterrestore="true"
/>
</tools>

The *backupwh* section is used to configure the backup folder. You need to create a new virtual directory (Application) on IIS called for example dbbackup and then specify the folder path using the hosting server name in the *backupfolder* attribute and in the *backupurl* attribute specifying the web URL for that folder on your hosting space.

The *restorewh* element specifies the folder to which you can upload your backed up database online and would like to restore them on your remote SQL Server. ASP.NET must have read/write permissions on this folder. Another important attribute is the *deleteafterrestore* which is clear and setting it to true means deleting the backup that you have already uploaded from the server.

Notice the name of *Server* in both elements. The server keyword should be replaced with the IP address of the server where your website is hosted.

Another important feature of this config file is the *Profile* section. The profile section specifies the path to the XML file that contains all the configurations that you need to do as an Administrator on the tool to show/hide the different features present in the myLittleAdmin. For instance you can specify in the profile file that you want to allow users to modify the content of a column inside a table.

To read more about the different configurations required you can still read the installation guide that ships with the tool when you download it to your hard disk.