Kronos Oracle to SQL Server Migration – SS Agent hiccup – Part 3
In our prior posts we described some of the human-ware issues encountered dealing with the degree of access that Javed Iqbal, a Kronos employee and migration expert, was granted. Javed is using SQL Server Migration Assistant for Oracle (SSMA4O) version 4.2.
During the Kronos migration, Javed encountered a counter-intuitive dialog stating that operational prerequisites were not met. The message was:
“SQL Server Agent is not running. You must start SQL Server Agent to use Server-side data migration engine”
He had not encountered this in prior migrations. Repeated attempts starting SQL Server Agent on the SQL Server destination machine that he was using (which was not the machine that he was running SSMA40 on) did not resolve it. The problem was actually a very common problem in IT: not reading dialogs in detail (I confess that I am also guilty of this).
Javed was doing the default client-side data migration and this message may be safely ignored. It states that this is a problem if you are using the server-side data migration. He noticed that the [Continue] button was not disabled and clicked it. Everything proceeded fine.
For an explanation of the differences between these two options, see this SSMA Blog post.
The reason that he had never encountered it before was simple, all of the other machines used for migration had a version of SQL Server installed on the machine that he was using. The box provided to him for this migration had SQL Server Tools installed only. The message indicated that there was not a version of SQL Server Agent running on the current machine.
Bottom Line: All of the information to do a migration is there. The complexities of migration are above the typical level encountered in most wizards so remember to do a careful reading of dialogs and documentation whenever the unexpected happens.