I ran into a goofy problem today that I’ve never seen before. I was installing ProClarity Analytics Server 6.3 and go the point where I had to enter the sa password to connect to SQL Server 2005. I had password that was a combination of symbols (% and $ to be exact), upper and lowercase letters and numbers. However, when ProClarity actually started the install process, it failed to create the database every single time, I tried different users, different security configurations, everything I could think of that would cause ProClarity to fail to create the database. The only thing I wasn’t changing was the password. Finally, I decide..maybe ProClarity is having problems with a character in my password. I changed the password to a dictionary word (I know…bad practice, but I was getting frustrated). What do you know?! It worked, so the lesson from today is that apparently ProClarity has problem interpreting either the % or the $ in the password for the sa account (or any account) when running the install. I know it can handle numbers and upper case letters as I have used those before in passwords. If I have some time I’ll do some more testing to figure out exactly which character it is and if the position of the character in the password has anything to do with it.