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How To Connect To Amazon RDS SQL Server Database Instance Using SQL Server Management Studio

Amazon RDS is a wonderful tool for creating databases in AWS. If you use Microsoft's SQL Server Database, you might be wondering how you can manage your database while using Amazon RDS SQL Server instances. The answer is, the same way you always have - by using SQL Server Management Studio. In fact, managing your Amazon RDS SQL Server database instance using SQL Server Management Studio is SUPER easy! Let me show you how.

I am going to assume that you already have SQL Server Management Studio installed on your machine and running.
  1. Open SQL Server Management Studio.
  2. Click on Connect in the upper right hand corner of the Object Explorer.
  3. Click on Database Engine.

  4. You will be presented with the following screen

    .
  5. If you are using Windows Authentication in Amazon RDS, then you will switch to that Authentication method. If you are not, then select SQL Server Authentication. In this case, my Amazon RDS SQL Server instance is set to use SQL Server Authentication.

    .
  6. Now, go over & log into your Amazon Console.
  7. Open Amazon RDS and find your instance. I am going to assume you know how to do this already. 
  8. Once you locate your instance, you are going to click on the instance name and scroll down to the Details area.
  9. Once in the Details area, you are going to select and copy the endpoint. This is the server name that SQL Server Management Studio will be looking for.
  10. Once you have copied that, go back over to SQL Server Management Studio and paste that endpoint into the Server name: textbox.
  11. You will now need to enter the User name:, which is displayed in the Username field of the Amazon RDS Details area.
  12. You will now need to enter your password, which is not displayed in Details. This password was added when you first created the instance.
  13. Once you enter the correct username and password, click Connect.
You should now see the familiar database structure in the Object Explorer and you can begin to manage this instance just like you do any local SQL Server database or remote SQL Server database you usually connect to. Amazon maintains a guide to their relational database systems, HOWEVER, the guide is NOT up to date. The guide will give you a GENERAL idea about what to do, in some cases, but it will be off the mark in other cases because the interface has changed since it was last update. Click here to read through the Amazon Relational Database Service guide.

That's it!

Enjoy!
Kila Morton

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