In this episode of “Whose Hack Is It Anyway?” we discover the problem of trying to install Microsoft SQL Server, version of the Year of Our Lord 2022, on Windows 11.

It all started on a faded blue and purple sunny afternoon, except it wasn’t

sunny, and I don’t know why it’s purple.

Essentially I ran across the error code -2061893606, which has something to do with the disk sector size being different in Windows 11 (apparently this has to do with NVMe storage? I don’t know) and SQL Server Express not recognizing it. So I cleaned it up, deleted the cached files because I figured there was a error with one of the cab files or something, then tried reinstalling. This time, I got error code 2068119551, stating attempted to perform an unauthorized operation.

Fantastic. I don’t know what that means <3

At this point, I’m sweating whole cars out of my neck. I need this installed, and it’s hard to get ~250MiB installed when you can only go at a max rate of ~1MB/s, fluctuating between that and less than 200KiB/s. It’s after 11pm, I have to get up at 5am for work, and I have the following class day where, ideally, I should have this installed!!! I don’t know what I’m going to do.

But don’t worry, we’ve reached you about your car’s extended warranty

Finally, I try installing SQL Server 2019. I genetically cross-splice several toad genes together thinking this will save the day, and lo and behold, I is saved.

Haha yes

So what is the lesson we’ve learned today? I’ve learned that I still love Postgresql, and that I’ve never in my life had such an unknown issue happen on a Linux system in my years of administrating them. But on Windows, I may as well just drop coins in a well and hope they come back up.