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Edifice Reqs II: The SQL

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Back in March, I posted about the requirements for TFS installation. I promised to post about "SQL Server and it's Various Components", but have been tied up with the Visual Studio 2008 SP1 like a Thanksgiving turkey (only not quite as delicious).

In any case, I'm back from outer space. I just blogged in to find you here... ahem. I'm getting side tracked with my song spoofs these days, apparently. Hey, they say blogs are supposed to be conversational, right?

SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 have quite a few subcomponents that Team Foundation Server requires. If you're installing TFS 2005, we require everything possible to be installed, running, and set for automatic startup. In TFS 2008, we investigated this requirement and determined there were several of these components and restrictions we didn't need. Depending on your desired configuration, there are different components you must have installed.

For all installs using SQL Server 2005, we require the SQL Database Engine ("SQL DB"), the SQL Analysis Services ("SQL AS"), and SQL Reporting Services ("SQL RS"). If all components are remote from the TFS Application Tier, you must install some SQL component on the AT so that we can use the SQL assemblies to talk with the remote components. The simplest way to achieve this is to install the "SQL Workstation Components". If you are using named instances of SQL DB, SQL AS, or SQL RS and don't want to use the port numbers to communicate with them, you should install the SQL Browser and set it to start up automatically. This will provide the hook TFS installation needs to find SQL components.

If you're using SQL Server 2008, please note that it's still pre-release. For TFS 2008 RTM, TFS was installable using the version of SQL Server 2008 that was available publicly at that time. TFS 2008 SP1 Beta is installable on the SQL Server 2008 February CTP (a.k.a. CTP6). Abdelhamid has a great post you might want to check out here that has the details on that score. For the TFS 2008 SP1 RTM release, we plan to support SQL Server 2008 RTM. At present, the components we require for SQL Server 2008 are the same as for SQL Server 2005. I don't anticipate that changing, but think it's important to add the qualifier in there just in case lightning strikes (twice) an alligator that's attacking a coin that landed on its edge.

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