Thanks Gail for the full explanation, so much better to have a forum thread that ends with helpful information 🙂

I will try connecting without a port number in the future......

Thank you GilaMonster... the force is obviously with you judging by your avatar.

Worked out the fix. Your note to check the ports prompted me to find that.

1) I hadn't turned...

Right I tried renaming both files, helpfully windows tells me the service that has it locked.

master.mdf in the SQLEXPRESS folder is locked by "SQL Server (SQLEXPRESS)"

master.mdf in the ARCHIVE folder...

@SQLRNNR

No aliases. Service for both instances are running

@MiguelSQL

Yes, very weird 🙂

Users appear in \ARCHIVE and the same ones again in \SQLEXPRESS (and ARCHIVE should only have...

Doesn't harm to rule out the obvious!

Ran it on both instances both came back with DEV-PC\SQLEXPRESS on both.... even if I right click DEV-PC\ARCHIVE and choose new query... it even...

I have also checked the registry as per http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143547(v=sql.105).aspx

Everything checks out correctly there as well.

They do, they are sitting there right in the DATA folder under each instance path, that's what I don't understand?!

-- Running this on two of the instances:

SELECT physical_name FROM sys.database_files...

Yes, that would work well, we might not normalise each sensor just yet, but we will certainly be heading towards that depending on growth and sensor data.

We will stick with...

Thanks clubbavich,

You're quite right, I'm un-normalising the data. Bad me!

Each system has a number of sensors (a little as 1, as many as 20), of 2 different types (but...

Hi, thanks for your feedback.

Yes, the tables are probably quite small compared to some of the other databases out there, we're not pushing SQL server to it's extremes that's for...