Registry

GConf!

Hmm, I don't remember with 2005, since I haven't installed that very many times. It would stand to reason, though, that they would want to make insecure choices more difficult to make, in an effort to produce out a more secure (by default) product. They always face all kinds of complaints like this every time they try to do it, but I think it's a move in the right direction, since people will complain either way (too hard to configure vs. not secure by default).

Do I "like" the registry? I don't know. I would certainly prefer a better (more open) storage system for the configuration data, and stricter management / enforcement of how things are added and removed from it (which I'm sure would only garner more complaints), but I think it does serve its purpose.

Like I said above, one thing that it makes very easy is deploying complex changes to application settings (in addition to relatively simple ones like this) to a large group of computers at once, without manually (either locally or remotely) having to do anything on any of the individual target machines.

I linked to the wrong FAQ because i did indeed have to edit the registry. If I find it again I'll link to it.

They might have changed things in SQL 2005 because I scoured the configs and MS FAQs and the only solution was to edit the reg..

I'm aware of the security of the auths, it's well documented in the setup but this is on a closed network and the only reason I wanted to try SQL auth is I couldn't get windows auth to work when trying to connect through Visual Studio.

Are you saying you like the registry? It wouldn't surprse me but I'm just wondering.

I should add that one reason they provide the option of doing it via the registry (in addition to doing it via the admin GUI) is that it makes it easier if you're managing multiple machines, because then you can write a script or use centralized policy management to apply the same setting to multiple systems without logging into each of them individually.

Is this a special installation of SQL Server? Every time I've ever installed that it asks you whether you want to use integrated auth, SQL Server auth, or mixed as part of the install process. You can also change this setting (post-install) using the management application (as described by this article).

All that being said, SQL Server auth is not as secure as integrated auth (which is why it defaults to not enabling it), so it's probably a good idea to avoid using it unless you have to for some reason.