While configuring the Events Database in VMware Horizon View 5.x, you might see the following error message:

An error occurred while attempting to configure the database. Double check the database parameters and ensure that the database is not down, restarting, or otherwise unavailable

View Event Database Error

A customer had this problem for a while and they had tried quite a few things to resolve this without success.  All the usual things e.g. Firewall, UAC, database ownership etc. were as expected but all attempts to configure the database resulted in the error message shown above.

The environment was slightly different from the norm in the sense that the database server (Microsoft SQL 2008 R2) had “SQL Instances” configured.  So, I double-checked that TCP Dynamic Ports setting is disabled and a static port is configured for that instance. It was all good too!

Running out of options, I checked the collation set for the database.  It was set to “Case Sensitive” i.e. Latin1_General_CS_AS.  As far as I knew, it should be set to “Case Insensitive” i.e. Latin1_General_CI_AS so the database was deleted and recreated using that collation.  Once done, the configuration was retried and it worked immediately!

Collation is not something that one would look at normally and hence this post. It can happen if you don’t set anything on the database when creating it, in which case, the database is created with the collation set on the server.  That collation might not be what you want.  Obviously, it could also be a genuine mistake and set manually or via a script upon creation.  Either way, the fix is to recreate the database with the case-insensitive collation set.

Hope this helps!

Ather