SQL Server 2019 Installation Woes

Now that SQL Server 2019 is officially here, I was eager to try it out. My upgrade/reinstall experience ran into several issues that I thought might be worth sharing:

  1. Upgrade/reinstall fails with “An error occurred for a dependency of the feature causing the setup process for the feature to fail.” With no indication what dependency failed. I solved it by extracting the iso file into a folder instead of mounting it.
  2. Analysis Services Tabular fails to start with “An error occurred when loading the ‘ASSP’, from the file, ‘\\?\D:\MSSQLSERVER\SSAS\Data\ASSP.0.asm.xml’.” This error was caused by changing the Analysis Services Tabular default folders to another drive. It could be related to my setup, such as permissions granted to that drive. I fixed it by leaving the SQL Server and Analysis Services default folders.
  3. The Polybase services can’t start and show perpetually “Starting” in the Windows Services applet. Consequently, the SQL Server Database Engine can’t be stopped. This was solved by enabling the TCP/IP protocol in the SQL Server Configuration Manager.
  4. Still an open issue although not a blocker – Any right-click action in SSMS connected to Analysis Services Tabular results in a significant delay.