How the hell does that happen? And they’ve already started selling the thing to corporate users! :smack:
Wow, you mean Owen Thomas has something bad to say about MS? :rolleyes:
I mean, I’m surely reading that story wrong. I have to be. MS, while venal and bloaty, surely can’t be that f-in dumb… can they?
Please, somebody, come and correct me.
I don’t know who Owen Thomas is (other than the writer of the article).
I just know what the article says. I think. I still have trouble believing it, if true.
Actually, even though the article and the first couple of paragraphs make it sound as if the entire SQL suite of products is affected, there is this parenthetical statement:
“(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.)”
Damn CNN, getting me riled up over nothing.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some Microsoft products don’t run on Vista. It’s pretty different under the hood from their earlier operating systems.
Windows XP forced me to buy at least $300 worth of new software when I switched. The vendors at that time all released new versions, and not updates so they could charge you for new software instead of making it compatable. A couple of those were bought less than 6 months before. Microsoft and I changed software, so I don’t blam them for that. I blame Microsoft for saying the applications would run on the new OS. A few of those new purchases didn’t work fully with XP when purchased, and only mentioned the problem on a paper in the box. So they made me buy the new version 6 months after buying the first version The reason I bought the new version was that I wanted it to do the feature printed boldly on the front of the box, that the insert mentioned didn’t work and an update would be released. 6 more months go by and the problem is fix in the new version, that you need to buy again because it’s not an update which the liciense grants you free when released. The version for which they claimed to be fixing the broken part in, and that you bought the software for, was never released as an update, for which they owed thousands of people an upgrade or a refund, because it never worked with XP. I not being rich as hell, did not take them to small claims court on the principal. I have never purchased software or recomended them to people ever again, nor will I.
There are quite a few Microsoft applications that do not run under Vista at the moment. I work as a System Administrator in an (almost) all-Microsoft shop, and installed Vista on my laptop since the day it became available. I have to run a number of things, including quite a few management tools, via an RDP session on another machine because the tools have not yet been updated.
My guess is that Microsoft does not anticipate that corporate customers will make a quick move to Vista (indeed, we don’t plan to upgrade until Q3 2007 at the earliest), so they were not terribly concerned about making sure all of their apps were compatible. I know that they are working on things as we speak, and I’d be surprised if we don’t see quite a few “Vista compatibility patches” in the first part of the new year.
Hang on a minute…is this the same “SQL Server 2005 Express” I’m thinking of? That teeny tiny little database engine that Microsoft gives away for free and is intended for hobbyists? That little piece of software that a couple of MS programmers spent a few lunchtimes writing?
OK, that last sentence probably isn’t quite true, but unless I’m confusing it with another product, I hardly think this is a disaster of a magnitude anywhere near what this Owen Thomas character is describing.
Actually, I’ve just gone back and tried to read the article more thoroughly…maybe my headache is affecting my reading comprehension skills, but I’m very confused. Is he actually talking about the Express edition throughout the whole article? Because he makes several mentions of “SQL Server” without any qualifiers, which to me implies the Standard edition (a step above Express). But he’s seems to be mentioning Express enough times to make me think that maybe that is what the article’s meant to be about.
If it is indeed the case that the Express edition isn’t Vista-compatible but the editions from Standard upwards are, Owen’s claims that Microsoft is effectively handing the database market to the competitors is a bit of an exaggeration. It would be like saying that they’re giving up the entire market for office application suites because Wordpad’s not Vista-compatible.
That was my initial reaction: The article and headline kept mentioning “SQL Server”, but then there’s that parenthetical statement that says “If you think the above means ‘SQL Server’ you’re wrong.”
But it says “SQL Server”!
Good, I wasn’t the only one that was confused which version he was talking about.
But if indeed SQL 2005 Express won’t run in Vista, we have a problem.
The entire purpose of Express is to be the replacement for MSDE, the lightweight SQL engine you can freely bundle with your app & distribute to your customers for local desktop storage of you app’s data.
I suppose MS is hustling out patches for these sorts of thigs. My firm also writes a lot of systems-level software, and each major OS revision breaks a lot of our code. We just wish the fully updated SDK would precede the public release of the OS by 6 months, rather than lag by 6 months.
Well, you know that the Zune, which until it was released, M$ touted as an iPod killer (then it suddenly became a “nice” product), doesn’t work with Vista. Of course, the odds of my buying a Zune are exactly on par with me being an early adopter of Vista: None at all.
Ahh, OK. I didn’t realise that. I can see how that would be a problem.
I just found this post on the SQL Server Express team’s blog about the issue:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlexpress/archive/2006/10/11/getting-things-working-on-vista-aka-dealing-with-user-account-control.aspx.
If I’m reading correctly (and assuming MS isn’t lying), the issue looks very minor. Simply put, the SQL Express install routine gives local users a login to the database, but next to no permissions. Under Windows XP this wasn’t a problem because pretty much everyone was logged into Windows as an Administrator, and the Administrators group had sysadmin access to the database.
But one of the big new features of Vista is a security system that isn’t a total joke, so you no longer have naive Administrators running around the system willy-nilly installing spyware and whatnot. As a result, users can connect to the database, but can’t actually do anything on it unless they explicitly chose to “Run as Administrator”.
You can probably guess how to get around it. Simply run the management studio as Administrator and give your own user a sysadmin role. Or you could even take the shockingly radical approach of only giving yourself the permissions you actually need. :eek: :eek:
So if I’m reading all this correctly, this is not a major bug at all. In fact, I wouldn’t even call it a bug. All I’d say is that the default configuration is not quite optimal for Vista. Claims like this:
…contain not one but two pieces of blatant misinformation.
[ul]
[li]Saying that “SQL Server” is affected is wrong – only the Express edition is affected.[/li][li]Vista (under an account with appropriate permissions) can run SQL Express just fine.[/li][li]YO YO YO! This one goes out to my homie Opal!! WASSSUUUUUPPPP!!![/ul][/li]This is the first time I’ve ever heard of Owen Thomas, but if this article’s anything to go by, Dooku’s comment upthread was pretty much spot-on.