This article is intended as basic guide for installing MS SQL Server for WATS. Differences in hardware and infrastructure might require different settings and configurations. refer to Microsoft official documentation for Microsoft SQL Server for details.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/database-engine/install-windows/install-sql-server?view=sql-server-ver15  

SQL Server installation procedure

Start setup.exe from the installation media.

Select Installation, and then New SQL Server stand-alone installation or add features to an existing installation to start the installation wizard.

Select the appropriate product key. Use the pre-filled key if you have an EA or have purchased licenses. If the installation is an Pilot or time restricted demo, you can use the Evaluation license.

Leave the check for updates checked to ensure important patched are installed through MS Update. 

The Setup rule-checks will warn about Windows firewall settings, follow the link under warning to see how to enable the exceptions in the windows firewall (not required for single server installation). 

Check the Database Engine Services checkbox. This is the only required feature for running WATS. For running WATS MES with replicated databases, you also need the SQL Server Replication feature.

For stability and performance, it is highly recommended to change the instance root directory to a separate disk. This is easily achieved by changing the Instance root folder to a separate disk. 

Use default instancename (MSSQLSERVER).

SQL Server Agent can be left to Manual startup, but often you may want to change to Automatic for running Backups etc. For improved performance, you may also check the Grant Perform Volume Maintenance Task privilege checkbox. This is a security tradeoff, but should be harmless in an internally contained system.   

We recommend using the default Collation for SQL Server. WATS Supports using other collations, but this might produce unexpected results in reporting caused by matching and sortorder. If you opt to use a differnent collation, we highly recommend using a case-insensitive (CI) collation.

Use Windows auth.mode (integrated), and click "Add current user", to ensure that the currently logged on user is added as a sysadmin on the server. If the server is domain-joined, you may want to add a dba-group as server adminstrator as well.

Under the Data Directories tab you can customize the drives/paths for database, transation log and backup files (default directories). 

Tempdb settings can be modified to increase performance. WATS is a tempdb-intensive application, and it is recommended to use a low-latency disk (preferably a local disk) for tempdb. Tempdb should whenever possible be placed on a separate disk to maximize performance. 

The best settings for tempdb is dependent on the hardware and infrastructure. 

MaxDOP (degree of parallelism) can be left alone with default values.

Memory usage needs to be restricted if the server also is used for other services. If SQL Server is not constrained on memory usage, other services might suffer severely, and possibly fail to load on demand. A general rule for memory restriction is to leave at least 2GB free memory to other services.

Filestream is no longer needed for WATS Server. Previous versions (prior to 19.2) used filestream, but this can now safely be left disabled.

Check the installation summary, and click Install to begin the installation process.