Adding Advanced Features to SQL Express 2016 upgrade installation

  • [Note: I was not able to post this on a SQL 2016 forum. I see the heading for those forums, but there are no forums visible.]

    I have a SQL Express 2014 installation on a stand-alone system. The system uses Reporting Services, so it's 2014 Express with Advanced Features. I am attempting to upgrade that system to 2016 Express with Advanced Services.

    I couldn't find an installer specifically for the advanced version, so I downloaded and started the installer (there is only one) and chose Custom Installation. During the installation, I hoped that I would either be able to select Advanced or stop the installation. Neither was true. By the time it was clear that the the advanced features were not present in that installer, the Cancel button and the close box were grayed out and the upgrade was in process. It's possible that I missed something or accidentally clicked Next, but I can't think how that happened.

    https://www.gittprogram.com/question/3311049_express-2016-with-advanced-options.html

    The link above demonstrates that I was supposed to choose Download Media--although there is nothing in that dialog that indicates that Advanced Services were actually hiding behind Door #3. Since Door #2 said I could "choose what to install", that one looked like a winner.

    Anyway, what do I do now? I have upgraded the SQL Server Express to 2016 but the Reporting Services are not there. I need to add Reporting Services to an existing installation and then upgrade the Reporting Services databases. I attempted the obvious--running the Advanced Services installer as an upgrade. But it says there is nothing to upgrade. I have database backups from the 2014 instance.

    I'm not sure what is the next step. Should I uninstall SQL Express 2016? And then what?

  • I believe that only Standard and Enterprise have paths for in-place upgrades;

    all other versions, like express, require an uninstall and re-install, i think.

    so you'll want to either do a side-by-side installation, or backup your users/jobs/databases, uninstall and install the new verison, then restore your users/jobs/databases.

    Lowell


    --help us help you! If you post a question, make sure you include a CREATE TABLE... statement and INSERT INTO... statement into that table to give the volunteers here representative data. with your description of the problem, we can provide a tested, verifiable solution to your question! asking the question the right way gets you a tested answer the fastest way possible!

  • Bad installer. You need to get the version for Express with advanced services. So, uninstall/reinstall or add a named instance.

    The 2016 forums weren't expanded by default. My apologies for that.

    They're there, but you need to click the plus to the right. I think I've fixed this.

  • I finally sacrificed some of my free time to address this stand-alone server. I uninstalled SQL Server Express 2016 and installed a clean copy of SQL Server Express 2016 with Advanced Services.

    Then I had to move the database and reporting services from the 2014 backups to the clean 2016 database. The database wasn't too big of a deal, but reporting services is proving more difficult.

    The clean SSRS database was created with the name ReportingServices, but the old one was ReportingServices$SQLEXPRESS. I restored the old one (and its tempdb) to the new server. Then I configured Reporting Services to use that database instead of the one that it installed by default.

    Now, when I try to access localhost\reportserver I receive this error:

    The feature: "Scale-out deployment" is not supported in this edition of Reporting Services. (rsOperationNotSupported)

    If I have a scale-out deployment, it's an accident. Some Googling indicates that I have too many rows in the dbo.Keys table of ReportingServices. But I'm not sure how to fix this. None of the Google posts are about this problem. I don't want to break the installation (I already did that once).

    So I can try to remove the "extra" SSRS (whichever one it is, and hopefully without breaking it), or I could remove the one I restored and start fresh with the new SSRS. I have a single shared data source and a handful of reports created in BIDS 2008. As this is Express, the reports are only accessed on the same machine that generates them. I'm not sure how to get them quickly added to the "new" SSRS.

    Ideas?

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