Mastering System Center 2012 Operations Manager

Frequently Asked Questions

What can I find here?

This is where you will find answers to our most frequently asked questions. Feel free to jump to the contact page to send us questions or remarks and we will try to address them. If we get questions more often we will post them here.

SQL Collation

We get questions about SQL collations for SCOM all the time. Some time ago there was a clarification statement from Microsoft about this subject. This document states that a few collations are supported for use with the English version for freshly installed SCOM 2012 management groups. This statement is reflected in our book as well in Chapter 2.

However? As it turns out Microsoft made a mistake in SCOM 2012 installer which still installs the Datawarehouse database (OperationsManagerDW) using the collation "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS". This means that if your server collation is different also the OperationsManager database and the tempdb database will have different collation settings from your Datawarehouse database and this will give errors such as the one below:

Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "SQL collation "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS" and "Latin1_General_CI_AS" in the equal to operation.

Also some people have found that a number of management packs are especially sensitive to this collation difference when trying to run reports (Exchange, Windows Server, nworks), which result in the above error. If you have the above issue, the only way to get around it is to completely re-install SQL!

Thus for SCOM 2012 the only correct SQL Server collation is "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS".

We were promised that for clean installs of SCOM 2012 SP1, this would be different and would be as stated in their previous blog post. However we have not confirmed that yet in freshly created test environments. Until that time we suggest you keep installing SQL for use with SCOM with "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS" as collation!

Pre-order your copy of Mastering System Center 2012 Operations Manager here!