Me, My Database and I

Reporting Services Frustrations

Have you ever been so frustrated with a software installation that you just ended up doing a fresh OS install and starting over?

I got that way last week trying to install Team Foundation Server 2008.

I wanted to install a named instance of SQL Server on my data tier, but Team Foundation Server wasn't too happy with the named instance of Reporting Services.  So, I gave up on the named instance and decided to install the default instance.

The problem was that Reporting Services wouldn't uninstall.

Apparently, the Reporting Services uninstall expects the IIS virtual directories to be present so that they can be removed.  Since Team Foundation Server configures Reporting Services and I didn't go through that configuration, the virtual directories did not exist.  I ended up tweaking the registry to remove the service registration and then deleting the Reporting Services directory from the hard drive.

Not fun, but I hope that others can benefit from my pain!

Chuck

SQL Server 2008 February CTP

Just a quick post to say that the February CTP of SQL Server 2008 has been released.  You can download it from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb851664.aspx.  You will need to subscribe to Microsoft Connect - if you haven't already.

Have fun!  I know I will.

Chuck

SQL Server 2008 Features

I've been seriously ramping up on the SQL Server 2008 feature set over the past few weeks, and I'm noticing that there are a ton of new features in the database engine that not a lot of people are talking about.  Everyone hears about the biggies - Resource Governor, new Date data types, Spatial data - but there are a few hidden gems that are quite nice.  I really like the enhancements to management studio that allow you to set up a configuration server to use as your master repository for your registered server tree.  That is going to save us a load of time.  The ability to execute a single query against a group of servers and have the results returned in a single grid is also quite nice.

Of all of the new features, I'd list these as my top five (in no particular order):

1. MERGE
2. Resource Governor
3. Intellisense
4. Management Data Warehouse
5. Date data types

I'm not saying that these are the best features in the engine, but these are the features that will impact my job the most.

Chuck