The Northwind database is referenced online in sample code quite often. However, this renders the sample code useless to someone who doesn’t know what Northwind is or how to use it.

The Northwind database is basically just an example database that runs under SQL Server. This database is populated with data that represents an imaginary company’s sales data. It is a very common example database for SQL Server testing and sampling.

You might be wondering, what is SQL Server (though for your sake, I hope not). Well, SQL Server is Microsoft’s database software.

How do I know if SQL is installed?
If you have Visual Studio 2008 installed, you probably have SQL Server 2008 installed and you don’t even know it.

You can go to Add / Remove Programs and look for Microsoft SQL Server.

Or you can check for the services.

Or if you aren’t good with the GUI, you can open a command prompt and run this command to see if you have the SQL services:

If you don’t see the services ouptut, you don’t have SQL Server Express installed. If you do have it, it is installed.

SQL Server is installed, now where do I get the Northwind Database?
Well, this was a struggle even for me. All the posts say the database creation script was installed with Visual Studio, but I sure don’t have any database creation scripts installed.

So I searched the web and Microsoft’s site for a while.

I finally found this link, but not until after about an hour of searching, hopefully this saves you some time.
http://www.codeplex.com/Wikipage?ProjectName=SqlServerSamples

So as of 3/4/2010, there was not “new” Northwind database, just and old one for SQL 2000. Which is fine because that old database is what most the sample code you find will be using.

I clicked on the Download link next to SQL Server 2000 Sample DBs.
I downloaded a ZIP file.
I extracted it.
I found the instnwnd.sql script among the extracted files.

How do I use the instnwnd.sql file to install the Northwind Database
This instnwnd.sql is nothing more than SQL script that will install the Northwind database for you. Well, you basically need your SQL server to run this script file and that is it.

If you have SQL Server Management Studio, just open it up and connect to your database, then File | Open the script and run it. But maybe you don’t know what SQL Server Management Studio is, let alone how to open it.

Sound easy right.

Well, everything sounds easy to some one who knows exactly how to do it, but if you don’t now how, it doesn’t sound easy. If you are among those that are hearing about this for the first time, let me help you.

Well, every server that has SQL Server installed has a command line tool installed called sqlcmd.exe. Hey, if I give you a command line you can run it, even if you don’t know what is really going on.

So just open a command prompt and run this command:

Ok, the database installed now what?
Well, now you have the Northwind database installed.

From here you are one your own getting whatever sample code you have to connect to this database and compile.