Vista Not Compatible With SQL Server

kiran_n sent in an article by Fortune's Owen Thomas on Vista not being compatible with SQL Server. An excerpt: "But now Microsoft has a problem. Vista, its long-awaited update to the Windows operating system, can't run the current version of SQL Server. The company is working on a SQL upgrade that is compatible with Vista — called SQL Server 2005 Express Service Pack 2 — but it's in beta and can be licensed only for testing purposes. Microsoft hasn't set a release date for the new SQL program."

Re:I can't help but wonder...

[nullforce]

SQL Server Developer Edition probably falls into this category, as well as SQL Server Express. Both of these might be expected to run on a workstation.

Re:I can't help but wonder...

[mgh02114]

people get what they deserve for running a Server application on a Desktop OS.

With all due respect, RTFA:

(Before any more of you fire off an outraged e-mail informing me that Vista doesn't run SQL Server, go back and read the above paragraphs again: I'm talking about SQL Server 2005 Express, which is the desktop counterpart of SQL Server - not the server version.)

actually far worse

[minus_273]

Actually, not only does it not work with SQL 2005 but it doesnt work with SQL 2000 either. In fact if you try to install SQL 2000 on vista it will try to stop you with messages saying the software has been tested to be incompatible with Vista. MS has not gone on the record that SQL 2000 will NEVER work with Vista [microsoft.com]. They want everyone to upgrade to SQL 2005 and have no plans to fix SQL 2000. If anyone hasn't used SQL 2005, they have removed DTS packages and the replacement is so horribly broken that simple things like copying a table from one database to another does not work.

Good thing there is windows server 2003 still.

Must have really bad code

[Anon E. Muss]

If there's one thing the Windows OS team is good at, it's backwards compatibility. I recently heard that a Win32 app I wrote 10 years ago for NT 3.51 still works on Vista. The SQL Server team must have fucked up something big for their code to fail on Vista.

Re:Why? - For development.

[ziani]

You install the "Express" version (which is what the article is talking about) on a desktop/laptop for development purposes. For example, I'm developing a specialized information tracking application that is intended to run on my company's intranet. Our company is 100% MS shop, so we have to design for SQL Server as the back end. I'm using MS Visual Web Developer 2005 Express to create the ASP.Net "business logic" or "mddleware", and a web-based user interface. Visual Web Developer 2005 Express automatically installs SQL Server Express and integrates nicely.

Just not on Vista, it appears.

Re:I can't help but wonder...

[Salvance]

I lead the IT department of a small company, and we use SQL Server Express on desktops all the time. Our clients use it as well, since almost all of them are far too small to own a real server (e.g. restaurants, doctors offices, etc.). We ran into this last week when we installed Vista for the first time to see what would happen. Needless to say, we were rather shocked when none of our internally developed apps would work. VERY annoying.

Re:FUD at its best

[thona]

Your post?

Bet on. One of the most idiotic ever.

See: ::"SQL Server" (suggesting its full fledged version) was NEVER compatible with Vista, ::or XP for that matter. It's meant for servers, not desktops.

Wrong, it was compatible. It is not meant to be used on that - on a poroduction environment, but it is compatible, and a good reason to install it on XP is development. Like having a SQL Server avaialble on your laptop. ::Second, Vista is NOT RELEASED YET.

Bullshit. Serious. Vista was RTM what - three weeks ago? It is even avaialble in a boxed vervion in shops already in limited distribution (i.e. in SOME shops, wide availability is in january). Companies / developers have download access ot the gold/rtm master code for weeks - like my company is rolling out Vista business between christmas and new year on all desktops, and is inthe middle of testing that.

Check your facts. Idiotic statements like yours make open source look bad.

Just for clarification

[Espectr0]

This is about the desktop version (SQL Server Express). Companies don't run that, so this isn't much of a big deal. The regular SQL Server works fine.

Re:actually far worse

[minus_273]

No, it does not work. Stop lying. The Transfer SQL Server Objects task does not work and actually performs an incorrect query on the source database. You get a message saying the table you have selected to copy does not exist.
This is knows as the transfer tables hell. example 1 [google.com]

another thread [google.com]

and so on. Just go on google groups and you will see tons of people on the microsoft newsgroups why have been screwed over.

If you have figured out how to change the query that it performs, please let the rest of us know. If you cant do that show some proof of someone actually getting it to work.

 

Re:actually far worse

[minus_273]

sucks if you are using the development edition on your desktop and your new machine comes with Vista doesnt it? since this is the el-cheapo $18 developer edition, it is fully functional but does not support connections from other machines. There is no option to run it on another machine unless you use remote desktop.

Nothing but problems.

[Tolkien]

I work for a M$ Small Business Specialist, and I have a laptop with Vista Ultimate RTM, I also have SQL Server 2005 Enterprise (with Business Intelligence services).

<rant> Short answer? I hate it.

The laptop is a 64 bit HP Turion AMD 2000+ with 2GBs RAM (which my boss considered enough to disable the swap file entirely, it barely is: my load average is 1.5GBs).
One of the reasons SQL Server 2005 craps out (even during the INSTALLATION of it) is because of the new UAC. Info [microsoft.com].

Also, Business Intelligence (SSIS, at least) services buggy as all hell (regardless of OS):
1) You can't debug Script Tasks or Script Components (known bug).
2) With Vista, I can't run my scripts because PrecompileScriptIntoBinaryCode must be True, and when it is, I get "The script files failed to load" error. As far as I can tell, there is no known work-around for this Vista-related bug, yet.
3) Web Service Tasks (which in our case is the primary reason we're using it to begin with) only work for "some" web services (no known list of these mysterious services, of course).
4) The Script VBA editor only allows GAC library references (I ended up creating my own DLL to act as a proxy between the web service and the SSIS package), which is a pain in itself.

The closest "working" dev environment you can have in Vista with VS2005/SQL Server 2005 is with VS2005 running as Administrator, and using SQL Server Management Studio purely for access to remote DBs (running on win2k3, of course). That's IF you exclude SQL Server Business Intelligence Services. This essentially means: Vista is GREAT, if you work around or avoid all the new features.
</rant>
Is anyone here currently hiring?

Wow. Okay, the rant went a tad off-track, now for the positives [microsoft.com] of Vista:
1) "Flip 3D": How innovative [apple.com], but to be fair, the rolodex style is cool.
2) ???
3) Aero makes Minesweeper looks cooler!$!$!

Re:I can't help but wonder...

[nullforce]

I believe Management Studio Express [microsoft.com] allows you to display a query plan, which is also a free product.

Re:I can't help but wonder...

[Luscious868]

The integration with Visual Studio makes it far and away the best DB to use to develop data driven applications and it's a breeze to upgrade your applications and their databases to SQL Server if you need to make the move. If you've got to use MS, there's no better way to go.

X11 didn't reverse anything

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that the presense of a GUI is completely irrelevant, but:

concept of server vs. client. (Plus X-11 and related display technologies reverse the terms anyhow, so they really have no meaning.

Not true: X11 kept the terms the same.

The X server that you're running is indeed a server: it provides a service to others over the network, who can connect to it. The X clients you're using are definitely clients: if you think xclock is a server, can you start it from your SysV init and then connect to it?

It only seems backwards in this era because everybody is used to thinking "my little PC is always the client, and the big Unix box down the street is always the server", but that's not true -- just an incorrect generalization.

If there's something that made "client" and "server" lose much of their meaning, it's P2P services: every process is both a client and a server.

Re:Misleading Article

[shutdown -p now]

Express Edition is not intended for testing only. It's also meant to be used by desktop software in need of a lightweight database engine; a replacement for MS Jet.

Re:I can't help but wonder...

[shutdown -p now]

It's the same as usual with MS platform. If you decide to go that way, then you're best off going all the way in. Win2003, VS2005, ASP.NET, IIS, MS SQL Server - you'll get more out of those combined than you would have by using them separately.

This is simply incorrect

[Anonymous Coward]

from
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/editions/express/sysr eqs.mspx [microsoft.com]

Vista Home Basic and above (SQL Express SP1 and SQL Express Advanced SP2)

Here's the deal. SQL Server 2000 is not supported on Vista, this includes MSDE. For SQL Server 2005 SP1, only Express Edition is supported on Vista. The other editions must wait for SP2 to be officially supported.

Re:I can't help but wonder...

[AlexDV]

This is correct. For the most part, "Enterprise" versions of Linux distributions differ from their workstation counterparts only in that the use repositories containing only the most stable and well-tested version of a given application package, while the workstations can afford to use ones that may be less stable, but contain more cutting-edge features. The other major distinction is the level of support that you're paying for. Most companies probably don't need 24/7 technical support for workstations, while this can be critical for a server. This is not the case with Windows. Vista's seven different editions are all essentiall Vista Ultimate, but with various levels of handicapping imposed on them.

Re:I can't help but wonder...

[conglacio]

for my studies, I need to be able to have a SQL server running on a desktop version of Windows. There are many students like me who's university lecturers use Microsoft development tools such as Visual Studio, and so we end up having to use it as well. Therefore, many of us have to worry about this issue.

Re:I can't help but wonder...

[Cico71]

I installed SQL Server Express 2005 on Windows XP and had no way to get a query plan.

set showplan_text on
set showplan_all on
set statistics profile on
set statistics xml on