Databases in MS SQL Server 2000

-->PUBS
The pubs database is a sample database used extensively by much of the SQL Server documentation. You can safely delete it if you like, but it consumes only 2 MB of space, so unless you’re scrounging for a few more megabytes of disk space. This database is admittedly fairly simple, but that’s a feature, not a drawback. The pubs database provides good examples without a lot of peripheral issues to obscure the central points. Another nice feature of pubs is that it’s available to everyone in the SQL Server community, which makes it easy to use to illustrate examples without requiring the audience to understand the underlying tables or install some new database to try out your examples. You can completely rebuild the pubs database from scratch by running a script in the \Install subdirectory (located right under the SQL Server installation directory). In SQL Query Analyzer, open the file named Instpubs.sql and execute it. You do need to make sure that there are no current connections to pubs, because the current pubs database is dropped before the new one is created.


-->NORTHWIND
The Northwind database is a sample database that was originally developed for use with Microsoft Access. Much of the documentation dealing with APIs uses Northwind, as do some of the newer examples in the SQL Server documentation. It’s a bit more complex than pubs, and at almost 4 MB, slightly larger. As with pubs, you can safely delete Northwind if you like, although the disk space it takes up is extremely small compared to what you’ll be using for your real data. It is recommend leaving Northwind there. The Northwind database can be rebuilt just like the pubs database, by running a script located in the \Install subdirectory. The file is called Instnwnd.sql.


-->MSDB
The msdb database is used by the SQL Server Agent service, which performs scheduled activities such as backups and replication tasks. In general, other than performing backups and maintenance on this database, you should ignore msdb. All the information in msdb is accessible from the SQL Server Enterprise Manager tools, so you usually don’t need to access these tables directly. Think of the msdb tables as another form of system tables: just as you should never directly modify system tables, you shouldn’t directly add data to or delete data from tables in msdb unless you really know what you’re doing or are instructed to do so by a Microsoft SQL Server technical support engineer.