OK, I downloaded and installed the new Katmai CTP today. And for those of you who don't follow Microsoft that much, CTP is just a fancy way of saying beta. Actually, it's not really all that fancy is it? Oh well... Anyway, here are my install notes so you'll know what to expect. Now, I did this on my XP box and I only installed the tools so far, so take this with a grain of salt. I had to uninstall the previous OK, I downloaded and installed the new Katmai CTP today. And for those of you who don’t follow Microsoft that much, CTP is just a fancy way of saying beta. Actually, it’s not really all that fancy is it? Oh well…Anyway, here are my install notes so you’ll know what to expect. Now, I did this on my XP box and I only installed the tools so far, so take this with a grain of salt.I had to uninstall the previous CTP by hand, but it uninstalled completely and ready for the new code to be installed. I’ve gotten on to them in the past for sloppy uninstalls, so good work guys! The uninstall does require a reboot, so be prepared for that. The first thing it did was install the .net framework 3.5 which caused one of those annoying reboots. Then when I came back up, it installed the setup support tools and powershell. No reboot required.Then the Installation Center finally appeared. The installation center is basically your menu of install choices. It has links for several things having to do with setup. Here’s a screenshot.So I’m actually installing as I write this blog, and I just got a wonderful surprise. Even though it didn’t tell me I needed to reboot after it installed the setup support tools and powershell, it just ran a check to give me my features selection and it’s now saying I need another reboot. We have roaming profiles here, so it takes me 15mins to reboot my box. So I’ll be back in a few mins. Guess I’d better not forget to save my work here. ~15mins later…OK, I’m back now and it passed the inspection this time… YAY! OK, so I chose my features, and I decided to go ahead and install a 2nd instance, so I’m doing a full install minus BI. Now I came to the section where it’s asking for user accts for the services. There’s no dropdown list for the local accounts and when I tried to use the local system acct, it thought forever and then kicked it back to me. So I pasted in the NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM from one of the other services. This is a step backward from before when we could just set everything to local system and then work them out later, which is what I prefer to do. And of course, I did lookup the proper name of the local system acct and it’s NT AUTHORITYLocalService. However, setup won’t let me run the Agent under that acct… whatever. So getting past that… You can configure specific users to have admin rights to the DB during setup now. That’s nice. Don’t forget to look everywhere though. These are tabbed screens so it’s easy to miss something. Here, I’ve blanked out my user acct, but the rest is ok.So at the point in this pic, it’s already gone through all of the features and listed them as ‘In Progress’. Then it listed them as ‘Pending’. So looking at the underlined section there, it looks like nothing is going to be marked as complete until the entire install is done. It’s a little annoying cause it would be nice to see the actual progress. OK, the install is finished now. And it requires ANOTHER reboot. The SQL program menu didn’t show up on mine until I rebooted. So the bottom line is this… the install isn’t bad, but it’s not exactly what I’d call smooth. All the reboots are ridiculous, and it takes quite a while to install. Frankly, Oracle 11g is still beating the pants off of MS in terms of an easy install. We should be able to point to a default install with very little intervention. I didn’t see a place to record an unattended install so I’ll be looking at install in detail on my actual servers over the next few days. So while the install isn’t bad, SQL2K was actually easier to install. One thing I wanted to make sure I tied into install was the user account list. Remember in that pic above where I was able to assign a windows user account to SQL? I was hoping that meant that the builtinadmins group was gone by default inside SQL, but it’s not. It would’ve been very nice for the install to add my service accts as logins, and whatever user accts I added manually on that screen, and left builtinadmins out. That would have made for a nice, secure default install. Oh well… maybe next time.Ok, I’m going to go play with install some more and let you guys know what I come up with. Watch my free SQL Server Tutorials at: https://MidnightDBA.ITBookworm.com Read my book reviews at: www.ITBookworm.com Blog Author of: DBA Rant – https://dbarant.blogspot.com Databases