Can We Integrate Visual Basic.

NET, SQL
Server 2000 and WMI?
(Page 1 of 4 )

This article mainly explains how to integrate WMI with SQL Server 2000, together with the
Visual Basic.NET language.
A downloadable file for this article is available here:
(http://images.devshed.com/af/stories/Integrate_
VB_SQL_WMI/example.zip).
The sample downloadable solution (zip) is entirely developed using Visual Studio.NET 2003
Enterprise Architect on Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition together with SQL Server 2000
Enterprise Edition. But, I am confident that it would work with other versions of Windows
(which support .NET 1.1) as well.
WMI with SQL Server 2000?
Recently, I received a question from one of the readers about whether WMI can be used with the
SQL Server 2000 database. That question really brought me up on my toes, so I immediately
started an article to achieve the same. Not every developer would know that we can manage
SQL Server 2000 using WMI. Another question you might want to ask would be “Is it really
necessary to work with WMI?” The answer would be that it is not quite necessary. You have
SQL-DMO, which is quite well matured as compared with WMI (of course it cannot even
compare). I already introduced SQL-DMO at the following link.
http://www.aspfree.com/c/a/VB.NET/Simple-BackupRestore-
Utility-With-SQLDMO-Using-VBNET/
SQL-DMO is generally used only by SQL server developers and not by system administrators.
What if the system administrator wants to access SQL server database information using a
common programming model? The answer would be WMI, because WMI is specially made
with them (and also with WBEM) in mind. And I introduced WMI with Visual Basic.NET at the
following link.
http://www.aspfree.com/c/a/VB.NET/WMI-Programming-
with-Visual-BasicNET-Breaking-the-Ice/
As everyone knows by now, WMI is the initiative for WBEM (Web Based Enterprise
Management) to fulfill Microsoft's vision. It has nearly entered into the market of system
administrators at the moment. But, in the future, there is no doubt that it would further penetrate
into the developer’s world as well. WMI is mainly used to manage tasks. The tasks may not be
related to a single piece of software or component. WMI almost works with every Microsoft
product.
Just imagine that you have Microsoft products already designed into about 15 to 20 servers (for
various scenarios) and you would like to manage several instances of all of them using a
common “language.” And WMI achieved it. WMI can work with almost all of them (as almost
all of those servers support WMI internally).
And another exciting point about WMI is that you can work with it using either VBScript at the
command prompt (or ASP for the web) together with WSH (Windows Script Host), or you can
develop very effective applications using the .NET framework. The .NET framework fully
supports WMI natively (which is also good news for ASP.NET developers who develop web
applications).
As I already introduced the concept of WMI in several articles at this site, I am not going to
cover any fundamentals of WMI in this article. In this article, I mainly focus on programming
WMI using Visual Basic.NET, with the target server as SQL Server 2000 (which is not well-
known to many developers).

Can We Integrate Visual Basic.NET, SQL

Server 2000 and WMI? - How to connect to
SQL Server 2000 using WMI
(Page 2 of 4 )

First of all, you need to install “WMI SQL Server Administration Provider” on an existing
instance of SQL Server 2000 (if not installed). This is not part of the default or custom
installation. You need to install it separately from SQL server installations. You can find the
“WMI SQL Server Administration Provider” installation files at the “x86\other\wmi” path of
your SQL Server 2000 installation CD. To be frank, I really didn’t check this on SQL Server
7.0. So, my focus will always be on SQL Server 2000 in this article.
Once it is installed (which is as simple as winzip installation), you can directly work with my
downloadable solution. The first button (captioned “version”) within the form tries to give you
the SQL server version you installed on your computer. If you can get it, you can confirm that
WMI works with your version. Let us go through the code I wrote:
Private Sub btnCaption_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As
System.EventArgs) Handles btnCaption.Click
Dim PrivateLateBoundObject As ManagementObject
PrivateLateBoundObject = New ManagementObject(Nothing, New
ManagementPath("\\server\root\MicrosoftSQLServer:
MSSQL_SQLServer.Name=""(local)"""), Nothing)
MessageBox.Show(PrivateLateBoundObject("VersionString"))
PrivateLateBoundObject.Dispose()
End Sub
From the code above, you can understand that I am creating an object (PrivateLateBoundObject)
based on the “ManagementObject” class. The “ManagementPath” starts with “\\yourhostname”.
There exists a WMI class called “MSSQL_SQLServer” within the “MicrosoftSQLServer”
namespace (which comes onto the scene after you installed the “WMI SQL Server
Administration Provider”).
The “(local)” says that I am trying to connect to my “local instance” within the same host name I
provided. There exists a WMI property called “VersionString” which is used to retrieve the
version information of SQL Server 2000 you installed on your computer. You should get an
output (Message box) something like the following figure.

Can We Integrate Visual Basic.NET, SQL

Server 2000 and WMI? - How to retrieve
“Databases” information in SQL Server
instance
(Page 3 of 4 )

Now we come to dealing with SQL Server information. How do we retrieve the “databases”
available in SQL Server 2000 using WMI? Actually it is simpler than you might have expected.
Let us go through the following code:
Private Sub btnListDatabases_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As
System.EventArgs) Handles btnListDatabases.Click
Dim PrivateLateBoundClass As ManagementClass
PrivateLateBoundClass = New ManagementClass(Nothing, New
ManagementPath("\\server\root\MicrosoftSQLServer:
MSSQL_Database"), Nothing)
Dim dbs As ManagementObjectCollection =
PrivateLateBoundClass.GetInstances()
Dim db As ManagementObject
Dim sdb As String
For Each db In dbs
sdb &= db("SQLServerName").ToString & " - " &
db("Name").ToString() & ControlChars.NewLine
Next
MessageBox.Show(sdb)
End Sub
Now, I am working on the “ManagementClass” rather than the “ManagementObject”. Even
though I didn’t specify that it needs to connect to “(local)”, it would automatically get connected
to the local database!
“MSQL_Database” is the second WMI class I used now (in the above code), to retrieve all of
the database names existing in the local SQL Server 2000 instance. As there may exist more
than one database, I need to work with the “collection” (which is why I used
“ManagementObjectCollection”). The following is the loop, which helps us to retrieve all the
database names automatically.
Dim dbs As ManagementObjectCollection =
PrivateLateBoundClass.GetInstances()
Dim db As ManagementObject
Dim sdb As String
For Each db In dbs
sdb &= db("SQLServerName").ToString & " - " &
db("Name").ToString() & ControlChars.NewLine
Next
“GetInstances” now would retrieve all “database” instances. The loop iterates through each
database instance, and appends the value of “SQLServerName” and “Name” (database name),
which are WMI properties, to the string “sdb”. Finally, it displays a message box with the string
(list of database names) we framed.

Can We Integrate Visual Basic.NET, SQL

Server 2000 and WMI? - How to retrieve
“tables” information in SQL Server instance
(Page 4 of 4 )

Now we come to dealing with SQL Server table information. How do we retrieve the “tables”
available in SQL Server 2000 database using WMI? Here, in this example, I am trying to filter
based on a particular “database”. Let us go through the following code:
Private Sub btnListTables_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As
System.EventArgs) Handles btnListTables.Click
Dim PrivateLateBoundClass As ManagementClass
PrivateLateBoundClass = New ManagementClass(Nothing, New
ManagementPath("\\server\root\MicrosoftSQLServer:
MSSQL_Table"), Nothing)
Dim tables As ManagementObjectCollection =
PrivateLateBoundClass.GetInstances()
'loop the information to store in an array
Dim table As ManagementObject
 Dim sTable As String
For Each table In tables
If table("DatabaseName") = "Northwind" Then
sTable &= table("SQLServerName").ToString & " - "
sTable &= table("DatabaseName").ToString & " - "
sTable &= table("Name").ToString() & ControlChars.NewLine
End If

Next
MessageBox.Show(sTable)
End Sub
Now, I am working on “ManagementClass” rather than “ManagementObject”. Even though, I
didn’t specify that it needs to connect to “(local)”, it would automatically get connected to the
local database!
“MSQL_Table” is the third WMI class I used now (in the above code), to retrieve all of
the table names existing in the local SQL Server 2000 database. As there may exist more than
one table in a single database (or more databases), I need to work with the “collection” (which is
why, I used “ManagementObjectCollection”). The following is the loop, which helps us to
retrieve all the table names of a particular database “Northwind” automatically.
Dim tables As ManagementObjectCollection =
PrivateLateBoundClass.GetInstances()
'loop the information to store in an array
Dim table As ManagementObject
Dim sTable As String
For Each table In tables
If table("DatabaseName") = "Northwind" Then
sTable &= table("SQLServerName").ToString & " - "
sTable &= table("DatabaseName").ToString & " - "
sTable &= table("Name").ToString() & ControlChars.NewLine
End If

Next
“GetInstances” now would retrieve all “tables” available. The loop iterates through each table or
WMI instance, and appends the value of “SQLServerName” , “DatabaseName” and “Name”
(table name), which are WMI properties, to the string “sTable”. Finally, it displays a message
box with the string (list of table names) we framed. You can also observe that I filtered the
tables of a particular database using an “IF” condition.
Summary:
I hope now you can confirm that we can use WMI to interact with SQL Server 2000 together
with the .NET framework. As this is an introductory article, I could not go up to the level of
“managing SQL Server 2000”. But you can expect a few more articles on this subject soon.
Check regularly on this site or sign up for the newsletter.
You can further enhance the coding I provided with list boxes, dropdown lists, and so forth. You
can also shift this code to ASP.NET. And that gives us a way to manage SQL Server 2000 using
a web application with WMI!
Any comments, suggestions, bugs, errors, feedback etc. are highly appreciated at
jag_chat@yahoo.com.