SQL Server 2005 – Reporting Services – Windows Vista

I just got my new laptop, and I am installing Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. Ran into a snag, that took me a little bit to find the answer.

First, SQL Server 2005 setup is just ghetto. There are two setups, “server” and “tools” and sometimes it just doesn’t work right. Anyways, only SQL Server 2005 with SP2 is supported on Vista. You would think that there would be a slipstream download with the RTM and SP2? Nope. Not that I could find at least.

Other thing I found. By default, you cannot install Reporting Services (SSRS). Reporting Services depends on IIS to run the report web server. Even though I had IIS installed on Vista, it still wasn’t finding it. Searching Google for “SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Vista” didn’t really give me much luck (easily).

Eventually I found this KB article http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/920201

Basically you need to turn more things on in IIS. I turned pretty much everything on but classic ASP and CGI, reinstalled SQL 2005 and no warnings – great! 🙂

So, I go to connect to my instance, and no AdventureWorks DB. I installed everything I thought? WTF? Well, I found this article on reinstalling AdventureWorks sample OLTP and DW databases

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143758.aspx

Because you know, once you install SP2 on SQL Server 2005, you can’t really run the RTM setup without it complaining, and then, it says you already have a newer version installed – bah!

So, in the end, SQL Server 2005 with all the fixings is doable on Vista. Just make sure you have IIS configured correctly!