Barriers to upgrading to SQL Server 2008

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Most IT Professionals like to use the latest (stable) version of a product, so what’s holding up your adoption of SQL Server 2008?

Hardware. If you are moving from SQL Server 2000 to 2008 that’s probably going to mean a new server as you’ll probably want to move to 64 bit hardware and that could be tricky to get through in the current economical climate. However the vastly increased power of that new server should mean that you can consolidate this cutting power and valuable rack space in your server room.  

Third Party Applications. It will be a while before some third party applications will e supported to run on SQL Server 2008.  The key word is supported as the majority of them won’t actually need to be changed that much, but they will need to be extensively tested.  Microsoft is no exception to this and I wanted to give you three examples:

  • SharePoint 2007 is only supported form sp1 (both Windows Sharepoint Services and MOSS), as per this article

 

  • Performance Point Server (PPS) will only be supported from sp2 which won’t be out at the end of the year.  I couldn’t find an online reference for this (except my own posts), but I have this on authority from the product team and our support engineers.

 

  • System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (RTM and SP1) now supports the use of SQL Server 2008 as a site database.  In order to upgrade a site-server database to SQL 2008 there are 2 hotfixes required:

    · ConfigMgr 2007 RTM customers must apply hotfix KB955229

    · ConfigMgr 2007 SP1 customers must apply hotfix KB955262

    The following are requirements when performing a clean install on a SQL Server 2008 database:

    · A clean install of ConfigMgr 2007 RTM on a SQL Server 2008 database is not supported.  You must first install SQL Server 2005, upgrade to SQL Server 2008 and then apply hotfix KB955229 

    · A clean install of ConfigMgr 2007 SP1 on a SQL Server 2008 database is supported, but should apply hotfix KB955262

Other Third Party vendors will have a similar approach. If your an ISV and reading this, then there are workshops run by my good friend Keith Burns to help make the transition less painful.

Testing Effort. Your own time is the other barrier to upgrading to SQL Server 2008.  You could do what some early adopters have done and just do the upgrade and phone support when it goes wrong, but hopefully you will run the upgrade advisor and act on what it’s telling you  before you upgrade. 

Obviously all of these are facets of the cost of making the upgrade, and need to be weighed against the benefits to you organisation.  In my opinion the management bits I have been presenting on My TechNet Road show are justification in themselves, and so my recommendation is to install the client tools on your own PC and see some of this for yourselves.

Technorati Tags: SQL Server 2008 upgrade,Performance point Server,System Center,SharePoint.