Installation Considerations › Special Character Support

Special Character Support

Note: ASCII alphanumeric refers to the following characters: A-Z, a-z, and 0-9.

This product does not support localized characters or double dollar sign characters ($$) in the following items:

• Computer name
• Microsoft SQL Server instance name
• Installation source media, response files, or destination paths
• User names
• Passwords

  Note: The password limitation does not apply to Active Directory or LDAP.

This product supports the following set of characters with any frequency, pattern, or ordering of those characters for the fields that are specified here:

• Computer name: ASCII alphanumeric and hyphen (-)

  Underscores and other special characters are commonly used by Microsoft Windows operating environments but are not allowed in RFC-952 even with the looser restrictions of RFC-1123. Their use can cause problems in systems that communicate over the network, or even locally when an application uses network-related functions. This condition is true even if your network is using the Microsoft DNS Server or no DNS server at all.

  Some versions of Microsoft Windows block the use of non-standard characters into the computer name in their administrative UIs, or they present warnings about the ramifications of their use. Still, the Win32 SetComputerName API lets you get around some of those blocks.

  Although adding IP address or computer name aliases into the \etc\hosts file of each computer may correct some problems you may encounter while using non-standard characters or names not allowed by the DNS standard, the deployment of this product in such an environment is not supported.

  Note: For more information, see Microsoft Article 909264 and the documentation for the SetComputerName Win32 API.

• Microsoft SQL Server Instance Name: ASCII alphanumeric
• Installation source media and response file path: ASCII alphanumeric, hyphen (-), underscore (_), period (.), open bracket ([), close bracket (]), space ( ), tilde (~), open paren ((), close paren ()), and dollar sign ($).
• Installation destination path: ASCII alphanumeric, hyphen (-), underscore (_), period (.), space ( ), tilde (~), open paren ((), and close paren ()).
• System %TMP% and %TEMP% path: ASCII alphanumeric, hyphen (-), underscore (_), period (.), open bracket ([), close bracket (]), tilde (~), space ( ), and dollar sign ($).

  Unsupported characters can exist in these variables if your logged on user name contains such characters or because you have otherwise manually defined them this way. In this case, change these system environment variables to contain characters meeting these restrictions.

  Note: The installation source media and response file path, installation destination path, and system %TMP% and %TEMP% paths cannot start with a space ( ). The colon (:) character is supported only when it immediately follows the name of an existing disk drive as part of a path specification such as C:\. The backslash (\) character is supported only as a path separator of directory levels.

• User name: ASCII alphanumeric, hyphen (-), and underscore (_).
• Passwords: ASCII alphanumeric, hyphen (-), and underscore (_).