Quick Note: RunbookService might fail to start after applying System Center Orchestrator 2016 UR4

UPDATE 15.11.2017: KB article is now updated and contains native SQL client as a pre-requisite for UR4!

Today I ran into an issue at a customer site while updating a SCORCH 2016 UR1 installation with UR4:

CAUTION:
After applying the UR4 patch for the management server and the runbook service you need to re-configure the Database Connection with the DataStore Utility (DBSETUP.EXE). This is described in the corresponding KB article here, but not very prominent. I missed it the first time :)
If you do not run the DataStore Configuration tool to re-configure the database, your Runbook Service will not start!

Issue

In the case of my customer, we could start the DataStore Configuration tool, enter the SQL Server but when we wanted to select the existing database, the tool produced an empty error message and an empty database list box. The Runbook Service failed to start and produced an error like "Unknown database type" in the corresponding log file.
I traced the DBSETUP.EXE process with Procmon on an UR1 and UR4 box and noticed, that the UR4 version did not create any network connectivity at all.

It turned out that the UR4 version of DBSETUP.EXE and the RunbookService is linked against some newer SQL libraries that were not installed on this customer machine. Thanks to my Support colleague Omar AlOmariĀ  for figuring this out!

Solution

Installing the SQL 2012 SP4 native client (ENU\x64\sqlncli.msi) from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=56041 did the trick. After installing this client, the UR4 version of DBSETUP.EXE runs smoothly as well as the Runbook Service.

If your server already has a newer version of the native SQL client installed, you will most probably not run into this issue.