Support Services

The Support Services folder contains the control icons for three services: Distributed Transaction Coordinator, Full-Text Search, and SQL Mail.

Distributed Transaction Coordinator

In a multi-server environment, DTC is used to ensure transactional integrity across servers. The only configuration available from EM is to start or stop the service. Chapter 32, "Distributed Transaction Processing," explains why and how you would use distributed transactions.

Full-Text Search

Full-Text Search uses indexes stored outside of SQL Server to provide fast searches on text data. The only configuration provided in EM is to start and stop the service.

SQL Mail

SQL Server has the ability to send and receive e-mail messages, but to do so, it first requires a mail profile to be set up on the server. After a mail profile is created, as Figure 4.19 shows, the Properties dialog box for SQL Mail can be used to select and test the mail profile. SQL Mail will be covered in Chapter 23, "SQL Mail."

Figure 4.19. Configuring SQL Mail.