Use this guide in conjunction with the more general Database Setup Guide for Any Database. These instructions add some reference notes specific to SQL Server.

1. Review the known issues for SQL Server.
2. Identify which character encoding to use. To do this, check the encoding currently used by your application server and Confluence. All three must use compatible encoding. For example, the default SQL Server encoding of USC-2 is compatible with UTF-8.
3. Create a new database (as an SQL administrator). If you set your application server and Confluence to use an encoding incompatible with USC-2, specify that character encoding for the database.
4. Create a new SQL user account for Confluence (as an SQL administrator). Provide full create, read and write permissions for the table. Please note, Confluence must be able to create its own schema.
5. Install the database drivers, if needed:
   • If you are configuring a datasource to connect to your MS SQL server database, you will need to place the jar file in <confluence install>/WEB-INF/lib (for Confluence 2.10 onwards) or <confluence install>/common/lib (for earlier versions). Information and links to the appropriate database drivers are available on Database JDBC drivers. You may also find this page helpful: http://jtds.sourceforge.net/faq.html
6. Start Confluence and visit the home URL (eg http://localhost:8080) to start the Confluence Setup Wizard and select a Custom Install, insert the relevant connection information.
   • When prompted for a driver class name in the database setup step enter:

     net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver

   • When prompted for the jdbc url, the format to use is:

     jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://<server>:<port>/<database>