Comments by Member 10317286 (Top 3 by date)

The answer depends a lot on your software. In general you would use SSMS to create the database for your application. Connecting to the database is done in your code and has nothing to do with SSMS. If you are hosting the application then you would install the database somewhere that your application can access it - typically where you are hosting it, but exactly where depends on where the hosting company allows it to be installed. When hosted you control if and what others can see of your database and code.

If your software is downloaded and installed by the purchaser then they will be able to see your database and any source code, scripts, HTML pages that you ship with the product. They won't see anything that was used to create your executables that are not needed at runtime unless you want to allow it. For the stuff you have to give them there are some "code obfuscators" you can use (use Google to search for them) that make your code very hard to read and understand to keep people from stealing it.