I have a software product that is written in VB.Net and uses SQL Server as the data source. I need to deply SQL Server with the application on initial install. Here's the issue the old SQL server 2000 was quick and upgrading to 2014 has added 14 minutes onto the install time. Enough to put a client off the product because thats way too long to wait for something to install!
I'm using NSIS to manage the installation but this is simply passing command line parameters to the setup to ensure that no use feedback is required and that additional components, required for the application also get installed.
I'm performing some installation tests on a VMWare machine, of fairly low specification I'll admit, its Windows 7 with just 1GB ram, 40GB HDD. I'm finding that the installation speed of the 2 versions of SQL Server are on a completely different scale with SQL
Server 2014 taking nearly 15 minutes to complete whereas SQL Server 2000 takes just 1 minute 20 seconds!
As we need to distribute SQL Server desktop engine with our product this means we're stuck with a terrible end user experience when they attempt to check out the software trail or we use SQL server 2000 which does not really indicate that we maintain our software.
I've read on some forums that this can be related to a locking issue where the installer is waiting for certain resources to be released. But I have not seen any such issues in the logs. Does this installer really take this long? Is there anyway of speeding
up the install?
Switches used
SQL Server 2000: -
setup.exe /qb INSTANCENAME=[Instance Name] SAPWD=[Password] SECURITYMODE=SQL DISABLENETWORKPROTOCOLS=0 REBOOT=ReallySuppress
SQL Server 2014: -
setup.exe /QS /HIDECONSOLE /IACCEPTSQLSERVERLICENSETERMS /INDICATEPROGRESS /SkipRules="FacetWOW64PlatformCheck" /INSTANCEID="[Instance Name]" /INSTANCENAME="[Instance Name]" /SAPWD="[Password]" /SECURITYMODE="SQL"
/QUIET="False" /QUIETSIMPLE="True" /ACTION="Install" /FEATURES="SQL,Tools" /ERRORREPORTING="True" /ADDCURRENTUSERASSQLADMIN="True" /MEDIALAYOUT="Core" /TCPENABLED="1"