Where is SSDT?

Now that Microsoft has decoupled SQL Server Data Tools from the SQL Server 2014 setup, the quest to find SSDT has started. You can download SSDT from the Microsoft SQL Server Data Tools page. Note that to get the BI project templates, you need the SSDT-BI install depending on the Visual Studio version you have (scroll all the way down the page to see the SSDT-BI links). If you don’t have Visual Studio installed (you probably don’t need it if you don’t code), I suggest you pick the latest, which as of this writing is Download SSDT-BI for Visual Studio 2013.

To make things a bit more interesting, Microsoft threw in another gotcha. When you run the SSDT setup, it will ask you if you want to install a new instance of SQL Server or add features to the existing instance. If you have SQL Server already installed, you might opt to add features to the current instance but you’ll be greeted later on with a rule violation “The CPU architecture of installing feature(s) is different than the instance specified. To continue, add features to this instance with the same architecture.” I have no idea what’s complaining about here given that when I tried this I had a brand new instance of SQL Server 2014 installed. It looks like we have a bug report on this already.

Although it doesn’t make much sense, the correct choice is to create a new instance although the setup won’t be creating any new instances since we are installing only SSDT here. After the install, you can start SSDT and see the beloved BI project templates.