by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/06/12 07:01 +00:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2008/06/12/8592551.aspx
Yesterday in You almost want a cease-and-desist order put out about the docs I talked about my strong feelings about documentation topics like Setting Up Windows Service Accounts (and in particular its section entitled Localized Service Names).
And in an offhand way I mentioned in a comment:
There are also functionality problems -- why not allow SIDs there in the dialog and/or include a lot of the names that are used on a particular machine -- like do the lookups and put them in a list? Both of THOSE solutions allow people to work within the problem space *without* misleading them, or forcing bad documentation....
I was focused on setup where not all great things were necessarily happening, but over in SQL Server Configuration Manager:
it actually does that, in both SQL Server 2008:
and SQL Server 2005:
and for that matter maybe in earlier versions. This lookup is done in the code and is SID-based underneath, so they are doing the right thing here.
All of which makes this whole Localized Service Names topic even less useful, in my opinion -- though the topic itself is filed under Installing SQL Server, clearly there could be a bit of UI or code sharing to put this same UI into setup since that is where it will most often be seen. Doing this and also supporting the SID entry are both acceptable answers that help get SQL Server a bit more out of the "document the localized service account names" business....
Especially if crucially important Windows issues like the fact that the first installed language decides the account names (something I talked about in What's the difference between running a localized version of Windows and running Windows with that user interface language?) since the Books Online topic with its
The following table shows service names used by localized version of Microsoft Windows.
doesn't really adequately cover yet another important nuance here clearly enough to help people....
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