Nancy Hidy

Nancy Hidy, Shell Information Technology International, is the user group leader; the Microsoft contact for the group is Tyler Chessman, a Technology Specialist within Microsoft's Houston Office.
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We are still looking for company sponsors to participate in the group (please contact Nancy if interested).The company should be willing to:

Provide food/beverages for the user meeting as necessary (Microsoft can periodically provide food and the featured speaker may be asked to provide food.)

Submit ideas for future topics and speakers to Nancy.
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Thanks to Shell (and Nancy) for sponsoring the food.

Nancy Hidy, Shell Information Technology International, Inc.

Nancy Hidy Wilson, Shell Information Technology International, Inc.

What's there to know about installing SQL Server 2005?It's just inserting a CD and clicking, right?Sometimes it is, but as Nancy explained, there can be surprises along the way, and not all of them pleasant.As a DBA for Shell with a global workforce in the tens of thousands, Nancy has plenty of experience installing and administering SQL Server 2005 in a large enterprise environment.Nancy emphasized the importance of actually reading the Release Notes so you don't overlook documented requirements such as making sure MSDTC is configured and Window 2003 cryptographic services is started.She also pointed out the importance of searching the Knowledge Base for important facts discovered after the Release Notes were published.As an example, Nancy cited KB910070 "FIX: The SQL Server 2005 Setup program may take a very long time to be completed" as something you might need to know if you have many domains.Here's a quote from the article: "When the primary domain has many external trust relationships with other domains or many lookups are performed at the same time, the time that is required to look up domain group names may increase significantly.Therefore, the time that is required to install SQL Server 2005 may increase."That's really quite an understatement after hearing Nancy explain one of her installations took 19 hours to complete!She applied the hotfix mentioned in the KB article and her installation time dropped to 0.5 - 1.5 hours, depending on what options were specified.SQL Server 2005 does a much better job of checking for prerequisites than SQL Server 2000, but you should not rely solely on the installer.Based on her experience and the documentation, Nancy provided the following additional manual checks:
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Nancy pointed out some common pitfalls with using the Feature Selection screen.
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Nancy pointed out that sample databases do not get installed by default in accordance with Microsoft's secure by design strategy.If you want sample databases, you'll need to explicitly specify them.

A person in the audience asked Nancy if his 1000s of DTS packages will migrate to SSIS?Nancy explained that the upgrade wizard from DTS to SSIS is not very good, so it's probably better to use the DTS Legacy runtime.
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Although Nancy is a big proponent of running SQL Server services under domain account credentials, she doesn't specify them during installation.Since her installations are scripted, she doesn't want passwords in clear text in any installation script files.By specifying Local System, no passwords appear in any files.After the installation is finished, only then does Nancy specify the user domain accounts.
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Nancy mentioned the lack of the ability to save a SQL Server 2005 installation parameters to a file for later reuse.SQL Server 2000 had the ability to replay an installation by using a setup.iss file.She referred people to my article on using an undocumented feature as a workaround.

Since Nancy's focus is on large enterprise installation, she didn't cover SQL Express or CD-ROM equipped desktops.

The panel included Nancy Hidy-Wilson (Shell), Alice Klemashevich (Intuit), Cheryl Fesh (Microsoft), Dania Jones (Mattel) and Marge Namdar (Texas Instruments).