Problem restoring a database to a SQL Server 2012 LocalDB Instance

I encountered a bit of a weird one today, which took some creative thinking to sort out, involving restoring a database into a SQL Server 2012 LocalDB. I am still not entirely sure what the root cause of the problem really is, but I'm sharing my solution just in case it proves useful to anybody else.

Using Python to connect to a SQL Server 2012 LocalDb instance

One of the new features of SQL Server 2012 Express is the LocalDB installation. This is a standalone install of SQL Server Express designed to support local databases which, importantly, requires practically no configuration . Although the documentation hints that developers were Microsoft's primary consideration behind LocalDB, there are many scenarios where having a zero configuration install of SQL Server could be very useful, such as offering offline access to a LoB application without needing to port the data to different database engine or necessitating a full blown SQL Server Express install on a user's machine.

Today I was experimenting with getting Python to talk to SQL Server LocalDB's - which proved to be very easy indeed!

First up, you'll need to install SQL Server Express 2012 LocalDB: http://www.microsoft.com/betaexperience/pd/SQLEXPCTAV2/enus/default.aspx

Next up you'll want to install the latest Native Client Drivers (SQLNCLI11): http://www.microsoft.com/Download/en/details.aspx?id=29065 (it's about halfway down this page)

Once both of those are installed, you're pretty much ready to go.

My Python environment is 2.7.2 on Windows 32-Bit. Into this I've installed pyodbc 3.03. From there, fire up IDLE and enter:

import pyodbc
con = pyodbc.connect('Driver={SQL Server Native Client 11.0};Server=(localdb)\\v11.0;integrated security = true')


And that should be you connected and ready to use a LocalDB from Python!