MS SQL starts on wrong port

Over the past few days we’ve been working with one of our clients to develop an enterprise search solution for one of their databases. Due to various historical reasons, the database is on MS SQL and has to stay that way. No worries right? Fail.

I decided to move forward with Solr because of its DataImportHandler feature and its ability to easily expose search results in various formats (JSON, XML, PHP serialized objects, etc).

For some reason I can’t seem to get MS SQL server to open on the port it is configured to. This proved particularly hairy to debug because I couldn’t tell if my JDBC DSN binding was failing, the JDBC driver was failing, or if the DB server was actually mucking it up.

The JDBC URL I’m using is:

url=”jdbc:sqlserver://localhost:1170;databaseName=dbName;User=test;Password=*****”

To try and narrow things down, I used the Eclipse Data Tools package to let me use a JDBC driver from within Eclipse to connect to the server. Using this, I could clearly see that the exception being thrown was that the MS SQL server was not accepting connections on port 1433.
As far as I can tell MS SQL is set up correctly.

I checked the MS SQL start up log and it was showing this:

Server is listening on [‘any’ 1170]


I tried using 1170 in Eclipse and Solr and bang everything fell into place.

What is weird is that the configuration is showing that the server should be running on 1433.
If anyone has any idea why this is happening I’d love to know for future reference.

I replicated this behavior on a production machine. In both instances I was using MS SQL Server 2008 Express. On the dev box I was running Windows XP SP2+ and the production box was running Windows Server 2003.