This is a fundamental architecture question dealing with the SBS configuration.

I have SBS Premium and I wonder why there are multiple instances of sqlserver.exe running.  I have 4, and assume they are SBS Monitoring, SharePoint, ISA Server and SQL Server.  The first 3 are located in folders and have services with the prefix MSSQL$.  Does this mean they are MSDE?  The last one is SQL Server proper, which I can access using Enterprise Manager.

 

When I go into SQL Server Enterprise Manager, I only see the application databases, not the SBS ones.  I wonder how I can manage the SBS ones; perhaps the answer is that I'm not supposed to manage them directly.  Is that correct?

Would it be a good idea and conserve resources to combine these 4 instances into 1?  Is this possible?  The other issue is that some of the sqlserver.exe instances grow in memory use, consuming all my server's memory.  That is the topic of many other posts, where I have received good advice.  I'm now down to rebooting the server once/week instead of once per day.  That still seems excessive to me for Windows Server 2003.  I thought it should be more robust than that.  A thought is that by having the separate sqlserver.exe processes, I can control them in a more granular fashion as I can identify the bad actors.  Do you agree?

I'm looking for enlightenment on this.  Thanks in advance. 

You can add those database with the Enterprise Manager:

 

 

 

 

You will need to type the exact name of the server and the instance name. It is NOT a good idea to combine those instances into one instance. In some cases it is not even possible to do that. Check out this article about the amount of Ram an instance consumes How to limit the amount of Ram ISA logging takes.

Hi about that memory consumption you could change some properties of your sql server. 

Right-click and take properties

there is an option to set how much memory sql max may take, processor time...

 

Hope this helps a litle