Question

I am told that SQL Server 2005 installation with BI tools and SQL Server 2008 with BI tools can’t work together on the same computer. Apparently ‘some’ things stop working. This was told to me by one of my team members. Since I’m new to SQL BI, I cant discount what he has said altogether and I dont want to install them both on my dev box and find out later that there is problem.

Has anyone here installed them both, used both sufficiently well and found it to be working fine?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I’m not sure if this is your development system or the server… If its the server you can have side by side reporting services on the same server at the same time (though you use double the resources too). I am not sure why you would though; the reporting services 2008 is vastly superior and can report on data from the sql 2005 instance. If you are worried about the lack of a service pack for sql 2008 you can report on data in sql 2008 from reporting services 2005 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143736.aspx)

If its local on your own pc you can have the development tools both installed at the same time (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb500441.aspx); though in this case i would use the sql 2005 tools only if you are migrating to sql 2008 as SQL 2005 code works on 2008 but not necessarily the other way around.

If you have reporting services models make sure you check out report builder 2 which ms launched this week. Its a much better user experience than report builder 1.