My upgrade to SQL Server 2012 SP1 from CU4 went well except for one glitch. After the upgrade was complete, MDS showed no models!

When I saw that I brought up the MDS database (for which I of course had multiple backups) on a copy of MDS 2012 on my workstation that was still on CU4, and created a package containing the metadata and data for my model which I have been working on for six months and really would not want to lose.

When I went to import the package back into the model-less main development server, it was already back! I don’t know what that was all about but if it happens to you, go have a cup of coffee, take a deep breath, and look again. And yes, I had tried rebooting both the DB server and the MDS web server. Whatever happened, that wasn’t the problem.

If this makes you nervous, and it certainly made me nervous, create a package (including data) as backup before you upgrade to SP1.

Update (11/14/12): Another MDS issue has surfaced after installing SQL 2012 SP1 — I can no longer access the “Import data” page of the MDM website. I am either told that I don’t have sufficient permissions, or I receive a “debugging resource strings are unavailable” popup from Silverlight, depending on the web server and login account used. On the web server that is giving the popup, which is the server on which the MDS database resides, I had to update Silverlight to the latest version before I could access that page at all.

It looks suspiciously like this problem, and may be due to SQL 2012 setup not doing everything it is supposed to, an ongoing issue on my development servers. I will shortly be doing clean installations for production, and hoping that this all just goes away.

Update (11/15/12): What caused my model to “disappear,” apparently, was that my regular Windows sign-on that I use for development lost its MDS permissions. They were still set in MDS but they no longer worked. I don’t know why they started working again, but after doing more tweaks on the server they went away again, permanently. Deleting and re-creating them didn’t help at all.

My production server is up now and I am in the process of importing the model there. I imagine that the fix for this problem is going to be to simply uninstall SQL Server 2012 from the development server, where it will no longer be needed.