This is just a short post for Friday. I have been working a fair amount with SSAS and the rest of the BI stack and recently  I was asked to install a default instance of SSAS on server that already had a named instance installed. I didn’t think this would take me a long time I had a quick look at Configuration Manager saw the named SSAS instance mounted up the ISO and off I went.

Click click click click done. Oh an Error…”The instance ID needs to be unique please ”  on further investigation it seemed that the existing named instance had the default instance ID. How could that be I thought?

It turns out that the current named instance was initially installed as the default instance then got renamed. SSAS instances are far more easily renamed than  Database Engine instances. The recommended way to change a database engine default instance to a named instance is to uninstall and re-install the server. Fortunately with SSAS the process is much more straight forward.

SSAS actually ships with an instance rename tool, this article on the Microsoft  site talks you through how to use it

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143692.aspx

My rename tool can be found her

C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\100\Tools\Binn\VSShell\Common7\IDE

The tool is called ASInstanceRename.exe

Fire it up and you get a screen that looks like this

Select an instance to rename from the drop-down list and specify the new name for the instance. In this case I’m renaming my default instance and making it a named instance imaginatively called NewInstance. You click on OK and the instance gets renamed and I get a named instance of SSAS

Now I’d have to connect to the SSAS instance using ServerName\InstanceName

If you want to make a named instance the default instance, then you leave the new instance name field  blank. This process will fail if you already have a default instance.