I've just finished the rereading Larry Nivin's entire ringworld series, starting with Ringworld, followed by The Ringworld Engineers, The Ringworld Throne, Ringworld's Children and finishing up with Protector. I did not read Fleet of Worlds or any of the other Niven "Known Space" books.

What a trip! This is something like 45 hours of Ringworld. I came out of it wishing that there were a Ringworld movie, that there were more artist renderings of the Ringworld and of the various alien species. There is Halo, I suppose, but it would be nice if there were a Ringworld movie using contemporary special effects.

I'm now reading an interesting book by Malcolm Gladwell called The Tipping Point. The book is an interesting and thought-provoking analysis of social trends and reminds me a lot of Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.

On the subject of economics, I've been predicting that any new president would see an enconomy bounce as investor uncertainty over the presidential election dissipated and as foreign investors, their trust in the US renewed by the departure of Bush and their interest piqued by firesale prices begin to take a closer look at US equities.

Now that we have President Obama, I'll get a chance to see if I'm right.

I've been fiddling with Sharepoint Services 2003 for a couple of days with the intention of moving our company intranet from its current proprietary format to Sharepoint. I set up a virtual machine as test environment and installed sharepoint using the add/remove programs wizard.

This installs Sharepoint v2.0, and Windows update then delivers v3.0. However, at no point in the installation did I notice a prompt for which database server I would like to use for the Sharepoint databases. Perhaps I pushed the wrong buttons or overlooked something?

By default, Sharepoint installs MSDE locally on the sharepoint server. Since it uses BLOBs as storage for its rudimentary documents and because I wanted to use SQLExpress for data storage, I decided to move the sharepoint databases.

This turned out to be more of a puzzle than I had anticipated.

Here are the steps that I took to move the sharepoint databases from myserver\sharepoint to myserver\sqlexpress.

1) I installed SQLExpress.

2) Using Management Studio, I connected to myserver\sharepoint and made backups of the configuration (sts_config) database and my content database (which I had called sps_intranet).

3) I used the stsadm utility to move the configuration database to myserver\sqlexpress. This command creates an empty configuration database. STSADM is located in the c:\program files\common files\microsoft shared\web server extensions\60\bin folder. To move a database, use the setconfigdb command as follows:
stsadm -o -setconfigdb -databaseserver myserver\sqlexpress.

4) On the myserver\sqlexpress server, I created a new database called sps_intranet and restored my backup into it. I also restored the backup of sts_config into the new sts_config database.

5) I updated the [instance] column in the [services] table in the [sts_config] database to the name of the new server instance. (It was "sharepoint" -- I updated it to "sqlexpress").

6) Finally, I made sure that the user account under which I had set Sharepoint to run was dbo for the two databases.

7) I restarted the sharepoint server and voila! I was able to access my sharepoint sites using the new database server.