setup

Some months ago I posted a method to overcome some quirks in the MDW database in a clustered environment. Today I tried to upgrade that clustered instance (in a test environment, fortunately) and I got some really annoying errors. Actually, I got what I deserved for messing with the system databases and I wouldn’t even dare posting my experience if it wasn’t cause by something I suggested on this blog. [Read More]

Recently I had to assess and tune quite a lot of SQL Server instances and one the things that are often overlooked is the location of the system databases. I often see instance where the system databases are located in the system drives under the SQL Server default installation path, which is bad for many reasons, especially for tempdb. I had to move the system databases so many times that I ended up coding a script to automate the process. [Read More]

Yesterday I ran into this error message while installing a new SQL Server 2005 instance on a Windows 2003 cluster: Setup failed to start on the remote machine. Check the Task scheduler event log on the remote machine. SQL Server 2005 setup, in a clustered environment, relies on a remote setup process started on the passive nodes through a scheduled task: For some weird reason, the remote scheduled task refuses to start if there is an active RDP session on the passive nodes. [Read More]

In order to avoid collation conflict issues with TempDB, all user databases on a SQL Server instance should be set to the same collation. Temporary tables and table variables are stored in TempDB, that means that, unless explicitly defined, all character-based columns are created using the database collation, which is the same of the master database. If user databases have a different collation, joining physical tables to temporary tables may cause a collation conflict. [Read More]