First things first: what version of arcgis are you using?
Here are a couple of links you may be interested in:
Composite Address Locator GeoService
Unable to Publish Composite Locator 10.2.2
Personally, I shy away from anything but editing with SDE databases. For locators, I'll replicate match data to a file geodatabase and then point stand alone locators to that data.
That should just about do it....