Every now and then customers ask me how they can suggest changes or behavior changes to SQL Server. Many of us are aware of Connect, where you can add feature recommendations and vote on other people’s suggestions. There are a LOT of recommendations, and I know Microsoft values your feedback and suggestions. Sometimes these recommendations are grand, and others are small – in either case, your votes do make a difference on how Microsoft prioritizes features and changes in future releases.
Recently, a couple of customers have talked to me about their recommendations. The first I will highlight was officially submitted by Joe Sack on behalf of his customer who would like to rename a named instance (not the server name): https://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/details/341638/rename-sql-server-instance-name-not-server-name. This customer is in the process of upgrading to SQL Server 2008 and discovered that several applications have hard-coded the instance name in the application. They want to minimize the downtime, and hoped that they could install side-by-side and rename the instance. Unfortunately, this is not supported. Because of this issue, an upgrade in this scenario will require more downtime as they will need to uninstall and reinstall the instance.
If this is something that you consider important, please take the time to vote on the connect submission.