Many times, we need to find information about the various features / version of SQL Server installed on a machine. If you ask a DBA, he can provide you information by looking at services and tell what all are installed. He might run some WMI/T-SQL queries to list the services of SQL Server and their versions. Let us learn about the Discovery Report.
Well, we don’t need a DBA to do that and even windows Admin (good news for Wintel team J) can do it. The SQL Server setup provides an option called “Installed SQL Server features Discovery Report” under Tools in Installation Center which can provide this information in a single place. Here is the installation center of the Start Menu.
Alternatively, we can also double click on setup.exe, which also launches installation center. Once launched, we can go to below option and click it. (Tools > Installed SQL Server features discovery report)
Once we click, it would fire setup.exe in the background and report various components installed and provide an HTML page as below.
As we can see it shows the version of all components installed not just SQL Engine.
Additional information: The SQL Server Discovery Report is saved to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SQL Server\ version \Setup Bootstrap\Log\<date_timestamp>\SqlDiscoveryReport.htm.In above version would be
100 for SQL 2008 and SQL 2008 r2 110 for SQL 2012 120 for SQL 2014 130 for SQL 2016 … and so on We can also run this same report without coming to UI by running below command from a command prompt.Setup.exe /q /Action=RunDiscovery
I have put /q for silent installation.
Have ever used this tool? I have used it for one of my clients today and they were surprised to see that they had an evaluation version of SQL installed.
Reference: Pinal Dave ( http://blog.sqlauthority.com )