Configuration Manager

I usually don’t post small things like this, but today I fought with this obnoxious problem long enough to convince me that it deserved a shout out to the community. When you create an alias in the SQL Server Configuration Manager, make sure that the alias name contains no spaces, otherwise it won’t work as you expect. In my case, I had a Reporting Services instance with many data sources pointing to a SQL Server instance (let’s call it MyServer) and I wanted to redirect connections to a different instance using an alias. [Read More]

Yesterday I upgraded my laptop to Windows 8.1 and everything seemed to have gone smoothly. I really like the improvements in Windows 8.1 and I think they’re worth the hassle of an upgrade if you’re still on Windows 8. As I was saying, everything seemed to upgrade smoothly. Unfortunately, today I found out that SQL Server services were gone. My configuration manager looked like this: My laptop had an instance of SQL Server 2012 SP1 Developer Edition and the windows upgrade process had deleted all SQL Server services but SQL Server Browser. [Read More]