This article builds on the previous post in this series, providing a step-by-step guide to setting up local and remote environments for MojoPortal.

In this post, I will walk you through creating a remote database, by which I mean creating a new MS SQL database on your hosting account.

This is a pretty straight forward task, but there are a couple of things to watch out for. For this reason, I give it a post of its own.

Log in to your control panel and select databases

Select SQL Server 2008

Press Create Database

Enter a database name and press Save

I strongly suggest using a different name for your remote database to your local database. It will allow you to easily identify if your local/remote connection string is being used when the other should be used

Click Create User

Enter user details

And that’s your remote database created!

There is one more issue to be aware of with your new database. The issue is collation conflict. Taken from Wikipedia, “Collation is the assembly of written information into a standard order”.

MS SQL databases have a collation attribute that can be set to one of many values. When I create my local and remote databases, I do not specify collation. Unfortunately they are created by default with different collations. This seems to have little effect, but it can cause occasional errors. Changing the collation of your local database is quite tricky and does require that MS SQL Server Management Studio be installed. For this reason, I will ignore collation for now and deal with it in the next few posts. Just be aware that the member list page is likely to throw up an error. Also, if you are starting a new site which you are planning to keep, you’re best ensuring the collation of local and remote sites matches.

The next post in this series shows you how to check the collation of your local and remote databases.

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