With SharePoint 2010 adding a good number of new databases to the default configuration one thing that is sorely missing is the ability to easily name those databases.
Is it just me who has to conform to strict database naming conventions in most installations of Project Server?
I’ve just been working on what I think is a pretty typical Project Server 2010 installation and found that in-order to simply prefix my databases names with something rather than let them be automatically named with a GUID I faced the following:
- Central Admin and the farm configuration is the same as 2007, the PSCONFIG command line will let you name both of those databases.
- Session State Service Application – the first hurdle, this one requires a PowerShell command to give the database a name, e.g.:
$serviceApp = New-SPStateServiceApplication -Name "State Service"
New-SPStateServiceDatabase -Name "MyPrefix_State_Service" -ServiceApplication $serviceApp
New-SPStateServiceApplicationProxy -Name "State Service" -ServiceApplication $serviceApp –DefaultProxyGroup
- Secure Store Application – Central Admin fortunately will let you name the database through the usual creation process.
- Search Service Application – Next hurdle and this one much bigger, three databases are required now for the Search service; Administration, Crawl and Property databases are created, this blog post has a nice PowerShell script to create the service with named databases but with 50 odd lines for the script I’m not going to repeat it here. Fortunately if you’re happy with not naming just one of those three databases, it is actually possible to create new Crawl and Property databases with specified names after creating the three using Central Admin.
- PerformancePoint Service – Well for this one I have not found a way to name the database?! I need to revisit this as there must be a way, but looking at the PowerShell command line options and searching TechNet I couldn’t find one!
- User Profile Service, Excel Services and WSS Usage are all well behaved and through Central Admin you can name the databases.
So it’s about time to get that installation PowerShell script done, as unless your happy with the default wizard configuration then this setup is getting quite long “just” to get Project Server 2010 installed.