As I didn’t follow the herd of zombies and moved to a so-called “launch party” at TechDays, I had the chance to download the SQL Server 2005 ISO files out of MSDN and started playing immediatly with it. During the past 6 months, I’ve had my share of SQL Server 2005 brainwashing and I’ve haven’t figured yet where to begin at and how to filter marketing bullshit from genuine added value. The proof the product has been pushed too soon into the market is the fact that they decided to let go a couple features (database mirroring will only be released for production usage in the first half of 2006 – I bet it will be included with the first product fixes in Service Pack 1) in order to release a stable product.

Developer edition is contained in a 2.8Gb file (which is still downloading at a blazing 8KB/sec). Enterprise edition is a ~800MB file. Any differences in features? Nope. According to Microsoft, Developer edition has the same feature set as the Enterprise one, the only difference is the licensing policies. So I tried merrily to install the Enterprise edition on my laptop (client tools only, mind you) as I keep waiting to see what’s on the extra 2Gb.

First thing I’ve noticed as I was trying to cleanup the laptop September CTP installation was it simply refused to uninstall, claiming I didn’t have the correct set of installation files and I had incompatible components lying around. “Add and Remove Programs” didn’t help either, so I tried to install the RTM version over CTP – It wouldn’t let me, as it called the same unistallation procedure I was trying to run minutes before. The RTM version, unlike the CTP versions, didn’t seem to include a “cleanup” utility built to erase any traces of the SQL Server 2005 CTP installations… It was time for some serious registry hacking, which I let go after 45 seconds or so, as I’d probably screw the whole WindowsXP installation and cause an uncertain damage on the whole buggy but stable system. A quick peek at the Microsoft newgroups revealed I wasn’t the only one facing these problems. The workaround consisted of getting a little program built for the Microsoft Office installation which nukes away software installation entries from the registry. The procedure is described in this article (Windows Installer CleanUp Utility) and oughta work for anything you’d like to uninstall which keeps getting errors (it doesn’t cleanup the files or unregister DLL mammoths, but it will let you install the same thing over again). I proceeded to delete all the entries for .Net Framework 2.0 Beta and the September CTP which lied around here since day one, then deleted the matching files and directories (that’s C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL yadda yadda yadda and stuff). As usual, YMMV: the guy right next to me did an almost flawless uninstall.

Setup refused to install the server components on the laptop, claiming it failed to have the hardware and software pre-requisites. So far, so good. Leave the big tasks for the big servers, altough it would be good to have a local database server for some tests. Guess I’ll have to try on of the other “lighter” editions… .Net Framework 2.0 is bundled with the installation and the whole installation process takes ages (as expected) and writes gazillions of new registry entries (ditto) and fills up around 700MB of disk space (no disk space estimation is given anywhere during the installation procedure).

The good thing about lenghty installation procedures is you get a lot of free time to surf on the web. That’s when I came across this SQLServer2005 vs. Oracle10g comparison which I’m having a good time peeking at.

Management Studio (which replaces Enterprise Manager) is still sluggish, taking almost 130MB total of memory usage (512MB available) and ocasionally eating up the poor laptop CPU (Pentium M 1.4Ghz) entirely while I’m staring at a static list of databases on one of my servers. Oh boy… This is going to get worst when I actually begin doing something…