Installation of Clarity at home

As one of the preparation steps for CA Clarity Technical Certification, I did a fresh installation of Clarity 7.5.2 in my laptop.
I've used Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition as the application database because of the operating system requirement for Enterprise edition. However, please note that this edition of SQL Server is not certified under the Clarity PAS for 7.5.2.

When I try to install the database from NSA, it seems that JDBC was unable to connect to the SQL Server. Then, I wrote a simple Java program to attempt to connect to the SQL Server using the shipped JDBC Driver (msbase.jar, msutil.jar, mssqlserver.jar), still the result remained.
Without wasting more time, I downloaded Service Pack 4 for SQL Server and installed it. This time, the connection was successful.

During the application database installation, the process terminated prematurely due to some collation errors. Geez, the server collation is Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS and the database is SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS and I suspect the installation script face difficulties in converting between these collations.
The installation guide specified SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS as accepted collation for the database. SQL Server Enterprise Edition don't have this issue as I did numerous installations using Enterprise Edition without any bumper. Anyway, I dropped the database and created a new one with server collation instead.

No major issues faced after that.

And remember to fill in that installation report for submission to the support. :p