MS SQL Installation Gotchas

TL;DR / when to use this: When installing the developer edition of MS SQL, TCP is not enabled by default — you can't connect on port 1433 until you turn it on.

Enabling TCP

Open SQL Server Configuration Manager:

1. SQL Server Network Configuration
2. Protocols for <instance> → TCP/IP → Enable
3. Restart the service, then connect on 1433.

This trips people up because the instance starts fine locally (named pipes work) but every network client fails with a connect timeout.

See also

• Serverless relational databases — the alternative when you don't want to babysit an instance
• Blog post: MS SQL installation