Thursday, April 29, 2010

How to change the server collation in SQL 2008 cluster

I was forced to change the collation sense a crap application didn’t support Latin1 collation. First I was sure that I needed to reinstall wholes SQL server with the correct collation. But after som googling I recognized that this is possible to do if I rebuild the systemdatabases. In books online you can find the solution to run the following setup command:

Setup /QUIET /ACTION=REBUILDDATABASE /INSTANCENAME=InstanceName /SQLSYSADMINACCOUNTS=accounts /[ SAPWD= StrongPassword ]
/SQLCOLLATION=CollationName

But when it comes to cluster you have to know these things before running the rebuild command.
1. You have to run it from the cluster node who is holding the instace.
2. The instance name shall not be written with servername\ instansname. Only the instancename shall be here.

Setup /ACTION=REBUILDDATABASE /INSTANCENAME=xxxxxxxx /SQLSYSADMINACCOUNTS=xxxxxxxxx /SAPWD=password /SQLCOLLATION=Finnish_Swedish_CI_AS

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Unable to start SQL service SSL encryption fails

I did get some lovely errors in the SQL server log when try to start the service

Unable to initialize SSL encryption
because a valid certificate could not be found, and it is not possible to
create a self-signed certificate.
TDSSNIClient initialization failed with error 0x80092004, status code 0x80.
TDSSNIClient initialization failed with error 0x80092004, status code 0x1.v
Could not start the network library because of an internal error in the network library. To determine the cause, review the errors immediately preceding this one in the error log

My environment was a two node cluster with windows 2008 and SQL 2008, SP1, CLU4. The error just appears on one of the nodes. On the first one SQL start as it shall do.
After a lot of digging I find a solution on the error. I just changed the account running SQL server. My theory is that the account has too many characters in the name. I have no true proof for this but I have seen some other stupid errors when using account over 16 characters. For example I have not been able to change the password or when add a node to a cluster it will not take the password even if I know I type the correct one. Anyone else who has experience about this? Please let me know.