General help

The installation process seemed very straight forward following the instructions on the site. I chose to use FreeTDS to provide the PHP / MS SQL 2005 link which worked well. We are using Windows 2003, PHP 5.1.2, IIS 6 and MS SQL 2005. The system has not yet been made available to the general student body as the 1.6 implementation is working well and is gaining acceptance with both students and staff so I do not want to add any, albeit minor, complicaitons.

I have a test scheduled for January which will involve approximately 150 students taking the test at the same time as part of a healthly eating programme. The current 1.6 implementation objected to more than 60 students using it at once so it will be interesting to see how this one goes (though it is on a lower spec server at the moment).

My only real concern at the moment is reporting from tests. We need to produce a list of the actual entries made by students. This works on 1.6 but on 1.7 it works for the screen mode but when exported it reverts to the basic final percentage. However, I am hoping to get reports out directly from the MS SQL database so this should not be a problem.  

We're a university of ~1500 Students. We've been doing limited testing of Moodle this semester with 3 or 4 classes and a basic LAMP setup. However, we plan to open it up to all courses by Fall 2007 and since our primary student records sytem (PowerCampus) is in MSSQL already, we decided moodle in MSSQL would be the best choice for the big deployment.

I've done a few test moodle installs with MSSQL and ran into a few issues. I've already filed 3 bug reports (well the first one was just a forum post cuz I hadn't found the bug tracker yet):

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=57924
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-7443
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-7525

The first was an issue in install.php where ODBTP based installs could not complete properly, the second was causing auto-course creation on external database enrollment to fail with MSSQL. Eloy promptly killed those two, the third bug is still open, it's an issue with syncing LDAP accounts via cron. The code in 1.7 and CVS right now only works with MySQL and Postgres. I attached a patch to add MSSQL (tested) and Oracle (untested) support and am waiting to hear back on it. (nudge, nudge)

I have to say I'd be rather nervous about deploying a MSSQL based install today to 1500 students. The MSSQL code still "feels" somewhat immature. However, I've been extremely impressed with how fast issues get resolved. Eloy fixed those first two issues each within 12 hours of my report, that's better service than what we get for our $20,000 commercial student database solution. And I'm quite confident that by the time we're ready to deploy moodle, it will be ready for us.

Performance wise, I can only say that it's rather painful to run Windows XP w/ MSSQL 2005 Express + VMWare Server and RHEL4u4 x86_64 (Apache/PHP) on a single server with only 1gb ram, but that's to be expected Our MSSQL box will likely be a Woodcrest based Xeon with 16gb+ RAM and RAID10 based storage while our web server will be a Dual Opteron 275 box with 16gb ram and RAID10 also.

Hi, I tried it, and I have one simple question before checking all the details: Can we restore our 1.6 courses into the 1.7 installation, which is now running the MS SQL database? During the restore process I get shown this message: "Error checking backup file. moodle.xml not found at root level of zip file." I did not try to upgrade the 1.6 moodle to 1.7 and changing the database from MySQL to MS SQL. I thought it would be okay to have a new installation of 1.7 and import the courses from the 1.6 moodle. But it seems not to be that easy.

I have read a lot about installing 1.7 with MS SQL, but not about upgrading (what means getting a MySQL database migrated to the MS SQL database.

I tried a fresh installation of Moodle 1.7 with MS SQL using ODBC. All went fine and the system was running ok. Unfortunately when I tried to restore a course created using Moodle 1.6, Almost all of the contents' label were blank (not even a space).