Server Name Mismatch

When I was configuring replication at a customer site today, I came across a problem where the internal name of a SQL Server didn’t match the machine name. I replicated (ha!) the problem on my laptop:

The message reads: “SQL Server replication requires the actual server name to make a connection to the server. Connections through a server alias, IP address or any other alternate name are not supported.”

To fix this problem, check the values of:

select serverproperty ('servername')

and

select @@SERVERNAME

As indicated in the error message, you will most likely find that they return different values. This is enough to confuse your Configure Distribution Wizard. I then used:

sp_dropserver ‘incorrect_server_name’

sp_addserver ‘correct_server_name’, local

And restarted the SQL service for good measure. More info on these procs is available in books online.

In my case, the problem was caused by the SQL Server having been built from a dodgy machine image, and the windows server having been subsequently renamed. Something to be aware of when renaming a server!

Hello Cloud – Getting The Environment Ready

First, you need to download the Windows Azure Tools For Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.1 (February 2010). This comes down as the aptly named VSCloudService.exe. You might encounter the following error:

There are a few pre-requisites to install first. Click here to view the detailed readme file. Once this is complete, the installation proceeds…

 

Launch Visual Studio 2010 RC1

File->New Project

Under Visual C#, go to Cloud. The option to create a Windows Azure Cloud Service is now enabled.

Playing with Windows Azure

I have been following SQL Azure pretty closely over the last few months. This week at Melbourne SQL Server Users Group, we had a presentation from David Lemphers from the Windows Azure team. To be honest I didn’t know a lot about Windows Azure prior to this session.

The architecture of Windows Azure is really neat – the ability to provision additional instances of your application, the separation of web and worker roles. The use of simple objects that we are all familiar with: blobs, queues and tables for storage. It all makes a lot of sense.

In my next few posts, I am going to document my experience as I attempt to write “Hello Cloud”. For this purpose I have downloaded Visual Studio 2010 RC1. My internet cap is really hurting right now.

Xobni – Neat add-in for Outlook 2007

At the moment I am testing out a little application called Xobni. It integrates with Outlook 2007 and does all sorts of useful things, like making it easy to find that attachment that some customer emailed you last week. Instead of trawling with the built in Outlook search, it presents a tidy context-sensitive list for you to click through. It also collects and displays interesting statistics on who emails you and when.

http://www.xobni.com/

A quiet day today…

Testing out Live Writer

Today I downloaded Windows Live Writer – the installation and integration with blogspot.com was pretty slick. Hopefully this will allow me to breathe some life back into my blog!

Performing an Edition Upgrade with SQL 2008

Recently I was working with a customer who had deployed SQL Server 2008 Developer Edition on a production server. Clearly this wasn’t ideal from a licensing perspective, and also developer edition can only use two processing cores (the server had 16).

To perform an edition upgrade, you can use the command line setup.exe with some parameters. Note that you cannot complete an edition upgrade via the installation GUI.

The syntax is as follows:

Setup.exe /q /ACTION=editionupgrade /INSTANCENAME=MSSQLSERVER /PID=<your pid>

Additional information on command-line installation of SQL 2008 can be found in books online:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms144259.aspx

It should be noted that when you perform an edition upgrade, it will take SQL Server back to the RTM bare-bones, and any service packs or cumulative updates will be stripped off.

The procedure took about five minutes in total, and after restarting the server for good measure, select @@version returns the correct edition.

Complications

There is a reasonably good chance that the build I started out with was not 100% kosher, but I hit a serious problem when attempting to apply SQL 2008 SP1. I came across very few references to this error on the internet.

Summary.txt didn’t reveal much further information, other than to say that a previous operation was not completed. Reinstalling the components listed did not help the situation either.

To summarise, the upgrade path on this server was fairly un-conventional. After being unable to apply SP1, it was decided to uninstall SQL Server completely and start again with a fresh install. I would be interested to hear if anybody else has tried this particular migration path with SQL Server 2008, as I am unable to say whether the SP1 error was a result of the server being in an unknown state when I started working on it, or if the upgrade path shown below is indeed problematic. Perhaps there is a problem with the Edition Upgrade technique? Hard to say at this point

SQL Server 2008 Build List

Here is a comprehensive list of SQL 2008 builds

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/SQL+Server+2008/63491/