Installing SP1 - Personal Edition

I have compiled some notes from my installation of SP1 on my workstation. My workstation

specifications are as follows:

• Dell Optiplex GX110
• PIII 650MHz
• 256MB RAM
• Windows 2000 Professional, SP1

Pre-Installation

My first step was to read Brian Knight's article on SP1. It provided me with some

basic information as well as the link to download the Service Pack. I know Brian has

tested this pack in Beta for awhile, so I was anxious to see what he thought.

Next I followed Brian's link and started a download of the SP. Since I am on a T-1,

this went pretty fast, but still required 10-15 minutes. While this was occurring, I

browsed the bug list to see if any of my problems had been fixed (didn't see anything).

Once the service pack was downloaded, I double-clicked on it and it expanded into a folder

on my c: drive. It was nice to have the pack give me an option where to unzip it as

well as create the folder automatically. This little feature is missing from so

many installation programs.

My wife rarely reads instructions for anything. I usually peruse the instructions to

be sure I don't do anything really dumb, and so I decided to read through the sp1Readme.htm file.

Since this desktop has a test database I used to experimenting, I was not too concerned

about any other databases and only backed up my one test database.

The next step recommended in the readme is to ensure master and msdb

both have 500kb free. This isn't much space, but if I hadn't read the notes, I might

not be aware. The autogrow feature for SQL 7/2000 usually prevents space problems

(until the disk fills), but I like to check. With a SQL Server 6.5 service pack

upgrade, I didn't read the notes and ran out of space in master.

The next item I read mentions that the service pack can be installed without stopping

services. These services include the SQL Services. However, if you do not stop these

services, the setup program will reboot your computer. Kind of a handy thing to

know. Especially since I was making notes as I did this. I elected not to stop the

services to see what would happen and saved these notes before running setup.

Running the setup.bat started a wizard in the setup program.Thi is the standard

SQL Server setup that selects local or remote computers, the instance, contains a new EULA

(not sure why this is needed), and next the authentication type dialog.

Once I answered all the questions, I get a "setup is starting service and verifying

something. Then I get the "setup has enough information and can proceed" dialog.

This is a great dialog that verifies everything and gives you one last chance to

quit. One thing I noticed at this point is that my SQL Server is stopped. So a

note for production machines.

First MDAC is updated with v2.6. In order to do this, my local IIS service and

Outlook were stopped. Once I confirmed this was ok, the MDAC installation proceeded. This

completed and the SQL Server portion of the SP started automatically.

This completed within a couple minutes on my machine and then various scripts were

run by the setup program. This took about another couple minutes (including ActiveX

registrations and system updates). finally I get a dialog requesting that

I backup the master and msdb databases.

Lastly, I did get the "do you want to reboot" dialog. I did.

After rebooting, I connected with Query Analyzer and Enterprise Manager and verified

that I could access data, my packages and objects still worked and nothing appeared

disturbed. Since I had not been affected by any bugs on my workstation, I am not sure

if anything was fixed. But nothing was broken.

Conclusions

Overall, this was one of the smoothest SQL service pack installations I have

had. Of course, the SQL 2000 setup program was drastically rewritten from SQL 7

and seems to work much better. Next week I'll be using Brian Knight's followup article

from actual installations to upgrade my development servers and I'll be posting some notes then.