Many features of ASP.NET rely on intrinsic application services such as membership, roles, profiles, and personalization. The application services use providers, objects that persist application service data in long-term storage. For example, the ASP.NET personalization service uses a personalization provider to save personalized user settings on Web pages.

Each application service uses one provider to persist the service's data in a particular kind of data store. For each service, a SQL provider is included and configured as the default provider to persist the data in a Microsoft SQL Server database.

Note:

To persist ASP.NET application services data in another data store besides SQL Server (such as a Microsoft Access database, XML files, or other RDBMS systems), you must create a separate provider for each kind of data store. To create a custom provider, you can inherit from the base provider for a particular application service, and extend it to handle the data for the service in whatever type of data store you plan to use. For example, to create an Access database provider for the membership service, you could inherit from the MembershipProvider base class, and enable it to persist membership data in Access.

The topics in this section provide details to create, configure, secure, and connect to the application services database for SQL Server.