Microsoft SQL Server Support Blog : SQL Setup and Upgrade

Class not registered error after restoring an Analysis Services database that uses the SQL Server 2005 SQL Native Client.

sqlblog — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:02:00 GMT

After restoring an Analysis Services database that uses the SQLNCLI.1 SQL Native Client (SNAC) on a server which has never had SQL Server 2005 installed, an error similar to the following occurs during processing operations:

Internal error: The operation terminated unsuccessfully.

OLE DB error: OLE DB or ODBC error: Class not registered.

Errors in the high-level relational engine. A connection could not be made to the data source with the DataSourceID of 'Adventure Works DW', Name of 'Adventure Works DW'.

Errors in the OLAP storage engine: An error occurred while processing the 'Internet_Sales_2001' partition of the 'Internet Sales' measure group for the 'Adventure Works' cube from the Adventure Works DW database.

Server: The operation has been cancelled.

During execution of queries that access data contained in ROLAP storage, an error message similar to the following is returned:

Errors in the OLAP storage engine: An error occurred while the dimension, with the ID of 'Adventure Works DW', Name of 'Internet Sales Order Details' was being processed.

Errors in the high-level relational engine. A connection could not be made to the data source with the DataSourceID of 'Adventure Works DW', Name of 'Adventure Works DW'.

OLE DB error: OLE DB or ODBC error: Class not registered.

Server: The operation has been cancelled.

Opening the Property Sheet for the Data Source from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or the Data Source Designer in Business Intelligence Development Studio (BIDS) and attempting to edit the connection string returns the following error from Connection Manager:

The specified provider is not supported. Please choose different provider in connection manager

Checking the connection string from either SSMS or BIDS, it is similar to the following:

Provider=SQLNCLI.1;Data Source=MyServer;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=sa;Initial Catalog=AdventureWorksDW

Changing the connection string to use the native OLE DB provider, similar to the following:

Provider=SQLOLEDB.1;Password=Olapolap1;Persist Security Info=True;User ID=sa;Initial Catalog=AdventureWorksDW;Data Source=MyServer

Likewise, modifying the connection string to use the SQL Server 2008 SQL Server SNAC, similar to the following.

Provider=SQLNCLI10.1;Integrated Security="";Persist Security Info=False;User ID=sa;Initial Catalog=AdventureWorksDW;Data Source=MyServer;Initial File Name="";Server SPN=""

The issue occurs because the SQLNCLI.1 provider does not ship with SQL Server 2008 and the provider name for SNAC connections changed in SQL Server 2008. The SNAC Version Provider names for SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 are:

SQL Server 2005 SQLNCLI.1

SQL Server 2008 SQLNCLI10.1

To workaround this issue, any of the following options can be used:

Edit the Data Source(s) for the database and switch from the SQLNCLI.1 provider to the SQLOLEDB.1 provider
Edit the Data Source(s) for the database and switch from the SQLNCLI.1 provider to the SQLNCLI10.1 Native Client provider.
Download and install the SQL Server 2005 SQL Native Client from the following link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d09c1d60-a13c-4479-9b91-9e8b9d835cdc&DisplayLang=en

John Desch

Microsoft SQL Server Escalation Engineer

Tracking License Information in SQL 2005

sqlblog — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 02:44:00 GMT

SQL 2005 no longer tracks licensing (per seat or per processor) via registry entries. SQL 2005 still reads the registry for this information, but the SQL 2005 setup doesn’t put licensing information in the registry during setup as in SQL 2000.

This is by-design. Hence, when ServerProperty(‘LicenseType’) is run on a SQL 2005 installation, ‘DISABLED’ is always returned.

This could be a problem for large companies who would like a programmatic way to track licensing rather than just having paper license tracking (which is the current method in SQL 2005).

Supported Resolution

Since SQL 2005 still queries the registry for licensing information, add the following key and values and ServerProperty(‘LicenseType’) will return license information.

Note: Licensing has always been server wide and not SQL instance specific. This setting would apply to all instances of SQL Server on the server.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\90\MSSQLLicenseInfo\MSSQL9.00

If you want to configure SQL Server for Per Processor then add these Registry Values under that Key adjusting for the number of processors you have a license for:

Name                         Type                           Value
Mode                      REG_DWORD          2           ß LICENSE_MODE_PERPROC
ConcurrentLimit      REG_DWORD          4           ß Number of Processors

If you want to configure SQL Server for Per Seat licensing then add these Registry values under the Key adjusting for the number of seat license you have purchased.

Name                          Type                           Value
Mode                      REG_DWORD          0           ß LICENSE_MODE_PERSEAT
ConcurrentLimit      REG_DWORD          100         ß No. of client licenses registered for SQL Server in Per Seat mode.

Test in SQL Management Studio

You need to stop and restart SQL Server 2005 before the information will be available to ServerProperty() as the registry is read on start-up of SQL Server. With the above settings you would see the following when you restart SQL Server 2005.

SELECT ServerProperty('LicenseType') as LicenseType, ServerProperty('NumLicenses') as ProcessorCount

Output:
LicenseType ProcessorCount

PER_PROCESSOR 4

Posted By: Eric Burgess

“Unexpected error occurred” during SQL Server 2005 SP1 install.

sqlblog — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 01:00:00 GMT

When you are trying to install SP1 you may see “Unexpected error” message. This error message will appear right after package has been extracted in a temporary folder.

Popup window will have a title “Unexpected error occurred”

Window text: “The following unexpected error occurred”.

Confirm Behavior

In order to confirm this behavior please switch to temporary folder where files have been extracted. By default, SP1 setup will create a temporary folder on disk with most of the available space. You should look for a folder like:

I:\b90f2a07b3b452e0b87d

Where I drive indicates one of the drives on your computer.

Next, run hotfix.exe and you should see the same error message.

This error message usually means something wrong with \\computername\drive$ administrative shared resource.

What Next?

Run following command in command prompt:

net share

You will see output similar to following

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator.DOMAIN>net share

Share name Resource Remark

----------------------------------------------------------

H$ H:\ Default share

F$ F:\ Default share

IPC$ Remote IPC

G$ G:\ Default share

ADMIN$ C:\WINDOWS Remote Admin

E$ E:\ Default share

C$ C:\ Default share

The command completed successfully.

Locate the drive to which SP1 was extracted to – in our case, I drive. If you’re experiencing issue described above, you will not see this drive in the output.

In order to fix this issue you have two options:

Use /EXTRACT parameter with SP1 setup to extract files to specific folder on drive where administrative share resource is available.

C:\>SQLServer2005SP1-KB913090-x86-ENU.exe /extract:E:\Hotfix

Then run hotfix.exe.

More details about update packages and their startup options can be found here.
Enable administrative share resource on drive with most available space.

For example in case if you will need to fix drive I: run following command from command prompt:

net share I$=I:

Hope this helps.

Need More Help?

Please use the technical support link on this blog to contact us, in case the resolution above didn’t solve your problem.

Posted By : Sergey Pustovit

MSDTC and SQL Server on a cluster

sqlblog — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 19:46:00 GMT

Through this blog, we will try to address commonly asked questions about MSDTC and SQL Server on a cluster. All this information is available in BOL and KB articles, but we will summarize it here for your convenience.

Do I need to install MSDTC on my SQL Server 2005 cluster?
Before installing SQL Server 2005 on a failover cluster, Microsoft strongly recommends that you install and configure Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MS DTC) on Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 operating systems.

Failure to cluster MS DTC will not block SQL Server 2005 Setup, but SQL Server 2005 application functionality may be affected if MS DTC is not properly configured.
What is MSDTC used for?
SQL Server 2005 requires MS DTC in the cluster for distributed queries and two-phase commit transactions, as well as for some replication functionality.
Should MSDTC be a clustered resource?
Microsoft only supports running MSDTC on cluster nodes as a clustered resource. We do not recommend or support running MSDTC in stand-alone mode on a cluster. Using MSDTC as a non-clustered resource on a Windows cluster is problematic. This configuration is problematic because transactions could be orphaned and you may experience data corruption if a cluster failover occurs.
Should MSDTC be in its own resource group?
To help ensure availability between multiple clustered applications, Microsoft highly recommends that the MS DTC have its own resource group and resources. If MS DTC cannot be configured to have its own resource group, the recommended alternate choice is to use the Cluster group and Quorum drive.

Other Resources
Before Installing Failover Clustering in SQL 2005

How to configure Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator on a Windows Server 2003 cluster

How to configure MSDTC in a Windows 2000 cluster environment

How to rebuild or move a MSDTC installation to be used with a SQL failover cluster

How to re-install MSDTC on Windows XP?

Hope this helps!

POSTED BY : Sanchan Saxena

SQL Server and Network Attached Storage (NAS)

sqlblog — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 04:54:00 GMT

Through this blog, we will address some of the commonly asked customer questions on SQL Server and Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Support for NAS database files with SQL Server
You can configure SQL Server to store a database on a networked server or NAS storage server. You need to enable trace flag 1807 before you can achieve this. For more information on setting up NAS with SQL Server, refer to KB 304261.
Are there any issues with NAS that I need to be aware of?
Before you decide to run your database files on NAS, make yourself aware of the performance and database consistency considerations for using NAS. These considerations are documented in detail at KB 304261.
What does Microsoft recommend – SAN or NAS?
Because of the risks of network errors compromising database integrity, together with possible performance implications that may result from the use of network file shares to store databases, Microsoft recommends that you store database files either on local disk subsystems or on Storage Area Networks (SANs).

Refer to KB 304261 for more information on this.
Does Microsoft certify any hardware that works with SQL Server?
Microsoft does not certify or validate that third-party products will work correctly with Microsoft SQL Server. Additionally, Microsoft does not provide any warranty, guaranty, or statement of any third-party product's fitness for use with SQL Server. This policy applies to hardware and software products. It is up to the third-party vendor of the product to provide any such warranty, guaranty, or statement of the product's fitness for use.

For more information, please refer to KB 913945.
If Microsoft doesn’t certify any third party hardware, how do I feel confident that I am running on good hardware?
SQL Server 2005 software works on the hardware certified for use with the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Any such hardware that is certified to work with Windows is posted at Products Designed for Microsoft Windows - Windows Catalog and HCL. You can use these hardware products from third party vendors with SQL Server.

Hope this helps!

POSTED BY : Sanchan Saxena

Co-existence of SQL 2005 with SQL 2000

sqlblog — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 06:13:00 GMT

We get several calls related to setup and installation questions. One such common question is related to installation of SQL 2000 and SQL 2005 on the same box.

Through this blog, we will try to address these commonly asked questions.

You can install SQL 2000, SQL 7.0 and SQL 2005 on the same box. However, there are certain special considerations that you should be aware of.

First, refer to this comparison sheet published by Microsoft at the MSDN website.

This sheet can be used as a handy reference to decide if your planned configuration is supported or not.

Now, let’s look at some of the specific scenarios.

Standalone Installations

x86 hardware running 32-bit OS
You can install SQL 2005 32-bit edition side-by-side with SQL 2000 32-bit edition.

If SQL 2000 is already installed, make sure that its service pack is either SP3 or SP4, before you attempt to install SQL 2005.

SQL 2005 can be at RTM, but you might want to consider moving to SP1.
x64 hardware running x64 OS
You can install SQL 2005 x64 edition side- by-side with SQL 2000 32-bit edition. Remember that there is no native SQL 2000 x64 edition.

In this situation, you MUST apply SP4 on SQL 2000 instances. This is because SQL 2000 32-bit support on x64 bit hardware running Windows Server 2003 SP1 was added only in SP4.
IA64 hardware running IA64 OS
You can install SQL 2005 IA64 edition side-by-side with SQL 2000 IA64 edition. SQL Server 32-bit editions are not supported on IA64 bit hardware.

SQL 2000 IA64 edition was released in tandem with SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3).

Emphasizing the need for SP3 or SP4

If you want to install SQL 2005 and SQL 2000 on the same box, you must patch SQL 2000 to SP3 or above. Let me explain why.

In SQL Server 2000, the identification of the server connection endpoints is performed by the SQL Server service. SQL Server 2005 replaces that function with the SQL Server Browser service.

In case you have SQL 2000 already installed, the SQL Server Service is will listen at UDP port 1434. However, when you install SQL 2005 on the same box, the SQL Browser service will wait for 5 seconds for SQL 2000 to relinquish port 1434.

With SQL 2000 SP3 and above, this works fine. However, versions earlier than SP3 do not properly share port 1434 and may not make your instances of SQL Server available to requesting client applications. The SQL Server Browser might fail to start in instances running on less than SP3.

To resolve this problem with versions of SQL Server 2000 earlier than Service Pack 3, stop SQL Server 2000, start SQL Server Browser, then restart SQL Server 2000. The SQL Server 2000 listener service continues to attempt to start on port 1434; therefore, the instance of SQL Server 2000 should be upgraded to Service Pack 3 as soon as possible.

SQL Server 7.0 has no similar capabilities and has no conflicts with SQL Server Browser.

Cluster installations

Pretty much the same, but with some special consideations.

If you are running a 32-bit OS on x86 hardware based cluster, you can install SQL 2005 32-bit edition side-by-side with SQL 2000 32-bit edition. Again, you must install SP3 or above for SQL 2000.
To the above cluster, you cannot to add another node which is running on x64 hardware. This is not supported.
If you are running a x64 hardware with x64-bit OS based cluster

· You can install SQL 2005 x64-bit edition with SQL 2000 32-bit edition with SP4

· You can install SQL 2005 32-bit edition with SQL 2005 x64-bit edition

For an IA64 hardware based cluster running IA64 bit OS, you can only install SQL 2005 IA64-bit edition with SQL 2000 IA64-bit edition.

References

For more information on SP3, refer to our blog here. More information on SP4 can be found here.

Information on SQL 2005 SP1 and its hotfix rollup 2153 can be found here.

Cheers!

POSTED BY : Sanchan Saxena

Installing SQL 2005 using ISO images

sqlblog — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 00:30:00 GMT

If you have received SQL Server ISO images (as part of your MSDN subscription or as downloaded from MS website), the file names would look like these:

en_sql_2005_ent_x86_cd1.iso
en_sql_2005_ent_x86_cd2.iso

where en represents English language SKU, ent represents Enterprise Edition, x86 represents that it is 32 bit. These values will be different for your ISO images depending upon what you ordered.

These ISO images are primarily the copy of the content in CD1 and CD2.

Before you begin installation, create a new folder on a drive that has plenty of disk space. Under this folder, create a folder called SERVERS and another one called TOOLS.

Next, using your favorite ISO software, you can mount *_cd1.iso file. Once mounted, copy the contents of this ISO image under the SERVERS folder. Copy the contents of *_cd2.iso under the TOOLS folder.

Once copied, start the setup by launching setup.exe from the SERVERS folder. Choose the options you want and walk through the setup to complete the installation.

For information on installing SQL 2005 using the CDs/DVDs, refer to our earlier blog here.

Cheers!

POSTED BY : Sanchan Saxena

UPGRADE - Eval edtion to full blow SQL 2005 editions

sqlblog — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 22:29:00 GMT

Recently, I have been getting a lot of questions about the SQL 2005 Eval Edition and its upgrade to a full blown edition of SQL 2005. I wanted to create this blog to answer those questions. Eval Edition of SQL 2005 SQL Server 2005 Evaluation edition provides...(read more)