One of dad's comics :-p

My aunt sometimes pays me a visit and every time she ends up putting things in order... According to my dad, she ended up saying "A Moroccan soko no, a moroccan soko no, soko no"... Soko is a market, a very messy one.

SQL Server Express Command - line installation (just a link to the good stuff)

We developers are all a little bit lazy, time conscious, we don't like to perform the same installation/upgrade over and over on 30+ remote machines.
It is Friday, and even though I added this link to my bookmarks already, I know it will take me a few minutes to find on Monday... yes, my bookmarks are that messy.
I need to create a cmd install batch that will

1. Upgrade the local MSDE instance to SQL Express 2005
   
2. Use Advance features during the installation as I'm not creating a new instance but upgrading the default one.
3. Add the replication components that will be needed for the merge replication
   
4. Add the client components in case I need to connect remotely to that rebel local instance :-p
5. Add the Connectivity components that will install the SMO and RMO (Server Management Objects and Replication Management Objects). I'm using both namespaces to trigger/manage replication from this .NET smartie client.

My cheat sheet is here:

Command-line installation

It doesn't seem too complicated, let's wait for Monday to see how it goes. Now I'm still working on my RMO code. We had Replication pretty much working with the a Replication ActiveX component for MSDE but this component is deprecated for 2005.

Have a nice weekend!

Merge Replication and our need to upgrade hardware

We've all been pretty busy lately with a juicy project. We have a client application that runs on TabletPCs. Among other interesting parts of this project we have SQL Server Merge Replication going on. We used to have a topology of SQL Server Enterprise Edition for the Publisher and Distributor and the reliable MSDE for the subscribers.
A few months ago our excitement increased when the company decided to migrate some of the servers to SQL Server 2005 Ent.
The excitement continue but we're having quite a few headaches with the replication. Our main problem is the hardware. Our client boxes have merely 500MB of RAM and the recommended requirements for SQL Server 2005 Express edition is 512, oh joy.
We tried to keep MSDE alive and use it still as subscriber but we use some of the features that invalidate the compatibility, in particular the Parameterized Row Filtering. More details on the incompatibility on this MSDN Reference. Please see the topic Compatibility Level for Merge Publications where it specifies that parameterized row filtering requires Compatibility Level for Merge Publications 90RTM or higher.

The solution, it seems we upgrade our subscribers to SQL Server Express 2005 and hope they still work at a decent level with the scarce hardware, or upgrade and hope there is budget for a hardware upgrade too :-p, at the end it's all about budget, right?

Cheers!