Installing SQL Server etc.

Warning: this post is only about technical stuff, and not very interesting technical stuff at that. I'll follow up in the next day or two with another post about more interesting data-miney stuff, but this is a post for anyone else running into the same issues that I did, as well as just to provide a complete log of my experiences in doing all of this.

TL;DR install windows updates before installing SQL Server

So: I have a bunch of Windows 7 licenses that I won in a competition that my good friend Jourdan Templeton (omg I totally just name dropped. You know, someone like 2 years younger than me. Damn...) entered me into.
So, because that's what I have, that's my OS. I do have an MSDN license that my work got me, so I could get Windows 8, but then I couldn't use my computer to play games.

Since I'm studying towards my MCSE in Business Intelligence, I pulled open my study guide for exam 462: Administering Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Databases, and checked what versions of SQL Server it supports.

Express, and possibly Standard. Well that's no good - SQL Server Express doesn't support Analysis Services - I need BI Edition or Enterprise for that. "Well" I figured, "who cares, I'm sure it'll work."
Good news is I was right - although I haven't actually used it for anything yet so I guess I'll see if there are any significant issues that show up.

No, that's not the problem that I ran into - it turns out that my computer had x86 Windows installed on it, but I downloaded x64 SQL Server BI Edition. So, I re installed Windows 7 with x64, and then tried to install SQL Server.

It got about 1/3rd of the way through installing and then came up with this error message:

Error 1935.An error occurred during the installation of assembly 'Microsoft.VC90.ATL,version="9.0.21022.8"

Oh no! What if I just can't install it? So I did some investigation - turns out it's because it was trying to install the Visual C++ redist package. Sure enough, trying to install that manually didn't work.
More googling, nothing much comes up. Lots of suggestions that it was corrupt registry. I tried the registry fixes that were suggested, except that I couldn't find any of the keys that they were talking about - what's going on here?

Eventually I gave up and turned off my computer.

Now, a bunch of these updates failed, so I just kept updating over and over again - there must be some kind of dependency checking that MS doesn't do properly or something. Eventually all updates were installed successfully.

After trying to install SQL Server again, sure enough it installed without complaint. Yay for turning it off and on again a bunch of times...

A call to arms

Hello future readers (I say optimistically)
This is my blog about teaching my machine to learn, and what I learn in the process.

My plan for it currently is to use the Microsoft stack of data mining tools - SQL Server (I'm downloading SQL Server 2012 Business Intelligence edition as I'm writing this) with Analysis Services, and probably just SQL Server Management Studio to develop it - which means I'm going to have to forget about my old Visual studio UI, and say hello to lots and lots of horrible looking MDX code.

Farewell my beautiful monster; I will miss you, except when I am at work

Now,before I scare too many people away (Ha! I say this in the second paragraph) I want to assure you that I am not going to make this blog overly technical.
If I want to post some code, or some in-depth discussion about an algorithm or something, I will put it in a spoiler tag or something, just as soon as I figure out how to add one of those.

Show Spoiler

Dumbledore dies.

No, the biggest discussion will be about what I'm learning from my machine, and what I'm managing to teach it - and I want suggestions. If you have any ideas about something you would like to predict, please comment and I'll try to get some data and see what I can do.
Want to know what the weather will (probably not, let's be realistic) be like in 3 months in Taiwan? I'll go grab me some weather data and do some data mining. Want to know what the best strategy is (probably not) for playing StarCraft? I'll go get me some replay data, dump it into SQL, and see what comes out.

Looks like a shark front moving in from the west - expect some turbulence

No task is too big (except the ones I think are too big) or too small (except the ones I can't be bothered doing) for me.

I promise to read all of the comments on this, until I become world famous* at which point I might start getting someone else to do it. I'm also going to do my best to learn more web design skillz, so that I can make this blog prettier. I will not use any pre-made template for it, so what you get is because I am this lazy.

One last thing: please don't be offended if you ask me to look at your blog and I don't - it's probably not because it's not interesting, and very probably because I don't like computers or the internet.

Disclaimer: by "world" I mean some other country, and by "famous" I mean "have a follower".