Very interesting, I though this was a delayed April 1st joke

sp_helpfile 'northwind' confirms that it is not a joke

It's 2008. Shouldn't we be looking for AdventureWorks_Data.mdf instead?

What about the Logical name for TempDB's mdf file: "tempdev"  Didn't Devices go out with SQL 6.5?  To be fair, I suppose MS do have a responsibility to make names backwards compatible...  Agree that the 8.3 convention needs to be 'retired', and also the whole C: Drive, A: Floppy, B: Floppy thing too!

So you gripe that we're still intentionally creating filenames in 2008 that conform to the old standards. But Northwind is much older than that isn't it and as you said, we shouldn't throw away all that work. So what's your gripe about again?

You can criticize the writers of Northwind for conforming to the old standard *poorly* (Eastwind definitely would have been better) but I disagree that anyone in your example is intentionally creating files with 8.3 file names. Copying such files maybe.

I am new in SQL, just finished an introductory course in programing language. I was told by the instructor that a free version of the SQL software is available to download online as well as a database named Eastwind tables I believe.

I think I downloaded the software SQL 2005. I cant go to the screen where the codes are writen and I do not know where to start. But most importantly I do not have tables ( a server db).

Any help is highly appreciated

thanks

Ted