SQL Server 2008 vs. Windows 7

Installed the RTM of Windows 7 on my home PC a couple of days ago. Then I tried installing SQL Server 2008 on it. Found out that SQL Server 2008 is incompatible with Windows 7. To make it compatible you would need to install SQLServer Service Pack 1 or later.

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On the same note, to make SQL Server 2005 compatible; you would need to install Service Pack 3 or later.

Restoring a database to a lower edition – SQL Server 2008

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SQL Server 2008 introduced a few Enterprise Edition-only features which changes the structure of a database when implemented. These features are:

• Partitioning
• Change data capture
• Transparent data encryption
• Data compression

Due to this, whenever you do a database restore or attach on an SQL Server 2008 instance with a lower edition, SQL Server would not allow you.

So what can you do when you have to move a database to a lower edition? Remove the offending features of course, there’s nothing else that you could do. But, how would you know which of the offending enterprise edition-only features are enabled on your database? Use the new dynamic management view sys.dm_db_persisted_sku_features. It’s a simple view which returns the feature you have enabled on your database along with its id. Hence, if the view shows any records, all you got to do now is disable the feature(s) before backing up.

Note: Of course partitioning was present in SQL Server 2005 as well, and even there you had to remove partitioning if you had to restore a database on a lower edition.

Slipstreaming SQL Server 2008 SP1

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Service pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 was released just a couple of days ago (07-Apr-09), eight months after the RTM. As exciting as it is, I did not want to put up just an ‘SP1 Released’ post, since it may seem a little too ambiguous and also since I had already done it on the ‘Universe‘…

One feature of this service pack is that it allows for administrators to slipstream it into the main product, hence when new SQL Server 2008 installations are required, they could just install it along with SP1 in one go. This obviously saves time and money. Put that together with the fact that many people haven’t gone ahead with SQL Server 2008 yet; you’ll have a lot of happy administrators when their organizations finally decide to go ahead with implementing SQL Server 2008.

I just tried creating my own slipstreamed SQL Server 2008 with SP1 drop (following these steps), coupling in the latest version of Books Online as well. The only issue was that the final size of the entire folder was more than 5GB, which requires me to compress it if I need to burn it onto a DVD. Isn’t it nice, when things just (almost) work…?