This one’s a short post. It’s more of a ‘what I do’ from my experience in rquiring, installing, and running simultaneous versions of Sql Servers on my laptop/desktop.

If you don’t get organized from the very beginning (the first installation of SQL Server), it can get a bit hairy as time goes by. Here’s what I do – every installation is a named instance suffixed by the version number. This is how my local servers are available to me:

1. .\SQL2008
2. .\SQL2012
3. .\SQL2012R2
4. .\SQL2014, and now
5. .\SQL2016

I have one or two instances running at any given time to manage resource utilization. How do you solve this problem?

Notes from the field SQL Server SQL Server 2016