Later in the afternoon I did some shopping while mia_mcdavid took a nap. I then made one of the changes to the post drill that I had thought of last night. Then a shower, and off to work. Fortunately, that just meant a trip to the basement, where, with a cable modem and VPN, it is almost like going downtown.

My task was to uninstall Microsoft SQL Server from a pair of clustered servers. This should be quite routine, but there had been some confusion when the SQL Server databases had been migrated to another cluster, and the uninstall failed. This is a production system. If it is down during business hours thousands of people, ordinary citizens as well as other employees, will notice. Hence the weekend task.

Since the regular Microsoft uninstall had failed I had to do this the hard way. This meant

1. Deleting all the program files.
2. Editing the registry.

The registry is where Microsoft Windows goes to look and see what is on the machine. If the registry does not agree with what is actually present bad things may happen. That is why you have to formally uninstall programs–you cannot simply delete the files. If you edit the registry and do something wrong the system may not even boot. So editing the registry is not a good time to take your blood pressure.

In fact, this went OK. I had one life flashing before the eyes moment when one of the servers was a little slow on the first reboot, but it did come back OK. The other needed some manual editing of the Start Menu even after the registry changes, but that also worked out and the server rebooted just fine.

I am not a fan of Microsoft, or Windows (I am writing this on a Linux system). However, Windows is what I have to deal with on the job, and I seem to be pretty good at it. So I guess I am stuck with it.