Fun with a SQLExpress 2005 upgrade 2008

On my development PC I had a 2005 instance of SQLExpress that was installed as part of the VS2008 setup. I thought I had upgraded it when I put on the SQL 2008 Management tools and/or VS2010 beta, but it seems I didn’t. I thought I would try the new Microsoft Web Platform Installer, but this also thought I had done the upgrade to 2008, I suspect due to the fact I had the 2008 management tools.

Note: If you are using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 RC remember you can’t just click on it to run from the web if you are running as a non-administrator user on your PC (as you should be, running least privilege). You need to download it and ‘run it is administrator’ or open it in a browser running as administrator to get it t even load.

So I needed to download the SQLExpress 2008 media to do a manual upgrade, as I remembered I could not use the developer edition media I had to hand to upgrade and Express instance. This download in itself proved problematic. I did a downloaded from MSDN, but the file I got gave a ‘not a valid win32’ error when I tried to run it. Also I noticed each time I tried to download it in IE8 it was a different size – not a good sign! Once I swapped to Firefox it downloaded without issue.

Anyway in the end I got the right media and access rights and the upgraded went smoothly. However then I tried to attach a 2008 DB (the reason I needed the upgrade in the first place) I got the error

Parameter name: nColIndex
Actual value was -1. (Microsoft.SqlServer.GridControl)

I had yet again forgotten to run SQL Management Studio as an administrative user. This error dialog is SQL Management Studio was of saying you don’t have the rights!