How to uninstall MS SQL Server?

When my wife tried to install Sql Server intoin her computer, she tried SQL Server 2000 Server first, because this is the first free software you can find from the official Microsoft website.

Too bad. 1 hour later, it turned out that this version could only be installed in Windows Server edition, including Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003 Server. It failed to installbe installed in her Windows XP.

So, she tried SQL Server 2000 Developer edition and failed again.

Now, she got SQL Server 2005 Developer edition, which is confirmed to be able to install in XP. But she kept getting this error message:

SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 Setup has detected incompatible beta components from Visual Studio or SQL Server. To proceed, use Windows Add or Remove Programs to remove the following: previous SQL Server Yukon components, SQL Server Support Files, .NET Framwork 1.2 and 2.0. Then run SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 Setup again. For detailed instructions on uninstalling SQL Server builds, see the SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 readme file.

But from the Add/Remove Programs she couldn't see anything related to previous version of SQL Server.

Holy Google tells us that it is very difficult to uninstall previous SQL Server, especially the SQL Server Express, which is a Beta version.

What is a Beta version? That is a test version sending out to target users to test and feedback to company. A software product should be tested before release, and the testing precedure should include Alpha Test (internal test) and Beta Test (external test). How can Microsoft givinggive out Beta version without warning? A Beta version software might have potential bug which can disfuntion the software or disfunction the whole computer system, and some bugs can have security problem which leads to the failure of the network.

From one Microsoft software developer's blog, he admits that the uninstalationuninstallation is complicate. The most complicate thing is that the uninstalation of Sql Server is tangled with the uninstallation of Visual Studio and .NET Framework. .NET Framework is very big, and it is related to the whole system, so uninstalling it might bring some trouble to the system. In "How to uninstall VS", Microsoft says:

If your computer has any of the pre-release versions(of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, .NET Framework) on it, they must be removed in the correct order BEFORE you begin installing the release version. This process is not officially supported.

That means if you take the wrong order, and your tried to install release version before you uninstall previous one, you are in DEEP trouble! You can't get rid of previous version, and you can't get support from them!

When a software is becoming bigger and bigger, the complexity of the system is incresing exponnentially, the maintenance of the system becomes impossible. 20 years ago, when we were using DOS, we could delete anything we didn't like. Now, if you delete one file in system folder, the computer can't boot up any more, and you mightmay lost one month's work. When the system is hard to maintain, we don't delete anything. We simply add more files inside, although they might be redundant. When we don't know which files are useless, we don't take risks to delete them. We wait for the system until it collapses.