I'm new at this whole DBA thing, so maybe this is totally standard practice.But we have a software vendor that wants remote access to our SQL server at an admin level to setup and install software ...

And Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 is looking pretty good. It allows you to manage Windows Server 2008 R2 roles and features (it also allows to manage core servers remotely).

MSDE 2000 and SQL Server 2005 Express do not allow remote connections, so an authenticated attacker would need to initiate the attack locally to exploit the vulnerability, the company says.

Beware of this update. Removing the update solved our crashes entirely," one admin said. "Also having the Remote Desktop Gateway issues after applying this patch on 2019 server.

Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: TCP Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server at Microsoft.Data ...

Resulting from this, remote desktop connections might be interrupted," Microsoft said at the time. "This issue might occur intermittently, such as repeating every 30 minutes.