Title: WordPress, Multisite, Windows, SQL Server – Anyone do this successfully?
Last modified: August 21, 2016

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# WordPress, Multisite, Windows, SQL Server – Anyone do this successfully?

 *  [cwalls](https://wordpress.org/support/users/cwalls/)
 * (@cwalls)
 * [12 years, 3 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordpress-multisite-windows-sql-server-anyone-do-this-successfully/)
 * I’m wondering if anyone has successfully installed/configured WordPress enabling
   multisite on a Windows server using SQL Server for the database?
 * Our initial WordPress install on Windows with SQL server appeared to work fine.
   We have custom themes, a few plug-ins, and were able to create pages, posts, 
   etc. without any issues.
 * Now we’ve enabled multisite on our WordPress installation, and it seems we keep
   encountering SQL errors. For lack of a better description, it’s like the initial
   install of WordPress was SQL Server aware, but the multi-site code is not. The
   log files have several examples of invalid queries due to syntax, non-escaped
   keywords, etc.
 * Has anyone successfully used WordPress multisite on a Windows 2008R2 server with
   SQL Server 2008R2?

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  [EdKaim](https://wordpress.org/support/users/edkaim/)
 * (@edkaim)
 * [12 years, 3 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordpress-multisite-windows-sql-server-anyone-do-this-successfully/#post-4685601)
 * I posted this reply to your reply on my thread. Double-posting here for discoverability
   for others.
 * TLDR: Don’t use WordPress with MSSQL.
 * Original thread with the kind of issues you’ll see: [http://wordpress.org/support/topic/sql-server-query-errors-for-search](http://wordpress.org/support/topic/sql-server-query-errors-for-search)
 * —
 * I dug into the MSSQL plugin and it turns out that it’s a complete hack. Maybe
   it’s the only way to support MSSQL, but the solution is to perform just-in-time
   string manipulation to translate the MySQL query to the MSSQL syntax. As a result,
   it’s extremely brittle and very risky to take a dependency on.
 * I wouldn’t recommend anyone use it because you can’t rely on WordPress updates(
   as they might break the translation layer since they don’t QA for it). You also
   can’t rely on plugins since they don’t build or QA for it. This isn’t really 
   anyone’s fault, but just a fact-of-life for software. In my case, I dug into 
   the WordPress changelog to track down the specific error I was getting in search
   to a seemingly innocuous change to order the results by relevance in title before
   body. There was no quick & easy fix, so I simply short-circuited the logic to
   not do that. I have other errors that happen occasionally, but my pet project
   site isn’t worth the effort to address them at this time.
 * To be clear, WordPress is awesome and MSSQL is awesome. However, WordPress on
   MSSQL is a bad choice because WordPress was not built to be DB-agnostic. Maybe
   someday that will change, but it’ll still take a long time for plugin vendors
   to migrate forward as well, and I doubt most will. I completely regret taking
   the Brandoo path. You should get off it as soon as possible.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The topic ‘WordPress, Multisite, Windows, SQL Server – Anyone do this successfully?’
is closed to new replies.

## Tags

 * [multisite](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/multisite/)
 * [SQL Server](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/sql-server/)
 * [windows](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/windows/)

 * In: [Networking WordPress](https://wordpress.org/support/forum/multisite/)
 * 1 reply
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [EdKaim](https://wordpress.org/support/users/edkaim/)
 * Last activity: [12 years, 3 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/wordpress-multisite-windows-sql-server-anyone-do-this-successfully/#post-4685601)
 * Status: not resolved

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