Does restarting Windows restart the SQL Server?

Question

Doesn't restarting Windows also restart the SQL Server?

Long story is that I just made the change so that both SQL Server and Windows authenticated users can log in. The server needs a restart for the change to work, can I just restart the machine instead of the server?

My server is having configuration issues, I wanted to change one of the settings so that SQL credentials can also log in (instead of just Windows authentication ). My admin said you can do any changes, but don't restart the SQL Server. I asked can I reboot the Windows server which the SQL Server is on, and he said yes.

Doesn't restarting the machine do the same as restarting the SQL Server?

Answer 1

Assuming you have a single MS SQL Server instance on a single Windows machine the answer is a very definite resounding yes, restarting Windows will mean restarting all the services running on it including SQL Server.

If you had some sort of clustering with automatic fail-over etc. configured and your apps behave with it properly (i.e. they don't somehow bypass the mechanism and connect to single host), then like other multi-node solutions (load balanced web servers and such) you should be able to drain-stop the node and restart without it affecting anything else (other than a performance drop if you have an active-active load balances setup instead of mirroring with fail-over), then do the same on other hosts in the cluster to make sure everything is updated. Even with a fail-over or load balanced solution, when the updated node comes back into service there may be some impact as there will be nothing in the buffer pool so initial queries will be slower than usual until the normal working set is loaded.

Answer 2

The SQL Server Instance runs as a series of Windows Services and processes, which also leverage the Memory of the machine to cache various things for the instance (such as the query plan cache). Restarting Windows effectively involves restarting those services and processes that the SQL Server Instance runs off of, in addition to clearing out the Memory of the server. So no, it is not possible to restart only Windows without restarting the SQL Server Instance.

Answer 3

Does restarting windows restart the sql server?

##    ## ########  ######  
 ##  ##  ##       ##    ## 
  ####   ##       ##       
   ##    ######    ######  
   ##    ##             ## 
   ##    ##       ##    ## 
   ##    ########  ######  

Answer 4

Thank you all for your responses. As everyone else said, the answer was Yes. I made some changes to the server settings and a notification popped up that you need to restart the server for the changes to take effect. I then proceeded to restart Windows and when I logged back in the changed were applied, meaning restarting Windows did restart the SQL Server.