May 18, 2014 at 5:32 am
Hi,
In our company we are thinking of upgrade existing sql 2008 and sql 2008 R2 Instances with sql 2014.
But we need to convince the management the reason why who should go for it.
Can I find any better document/s that will explain the need/advantages of going for 2014?
Thanks.
May 18, 2014 at 6:17 am
One reason could be the end of the Mainstream Support for 2008R2 (July 2014).
On the other hand you'll need to be aware of the change in terms of licensing cost that might increase the cost for the new version significantly.
And finally, the question is: Do you really need the new version or do you simply "want" it.
If 2008R2 covers all the business needs and the support issue is not significant for your business, it might become a hard discussion to convince them to spend the money...
Helpful Link: New features of SQL2014.
May 18, 2014 at 9:17 am
Here is a link to a SQL Saturday session I did on new and enhanced features of SQL 2014. If you are on enterprise edition there are some substantial improvements that may benefit your applications.
http://www.sqlsaturday.com/viewsession.aspx?sat=285&sessionid=18866
But ALL editions of SQL Server benefit from the SQL 2012 TSQL enhancements related to windowing functions. I note though that taking advantage of those requires some study and refactoring your app/report code.
http://www.sqlsaturday.com/viewsession.aspx?sat=280&sessionid=19017
As was mentioned supportability could be important for your company, and licensing could be significantly higher. Hopefully you are due for a hardware refresh too and you may be able to get substantially more processing power for less cores than some older hardware.
Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service
May 19, 2014 at 12:05 am
This was removed by the editor as SPAM
May 19, 2014 at 7:38 am
If you're upgrading because of concerns about the general age of the software, then you should just upgrade to the latest version. There shouldn't be any discussion. But, any other reason to upgrade should come down to "we need function x and the only place to get it SQL Server 2014." Going through the What's New documentation should be all you need there. The link already posted covers it very well.
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May 19, 2014 at 9:07 am
For the bulk of systems there aren't any additional features in 2012 or 2014 that will make a system run better for us. The biggest feature of SQL2008R2 for me was backup compression was introduced into Standard Edition. That makes MY life easier. Other than support from Microsoft I cannot give any valid reason to my boss to spend the thousands and thousands of dollars to upgrade our 50 production SQL Servers from 2008 to 2012 or 2014. We just completed our last major set of databases (50) from SQL2000 to 2008R2 which was a 2 year project.
May 19, 2014 at 1:28 pm
Markus (5/19/2014)
For the bulk of systems there aren't any additional features in 2012 or 2014 that will make a system run better for us. The biggest feature of SQL2008R2 for me was backup compression was introduced into Standard Edition. That makes MY life easier. Other than support from Microsoft I cannot give any valid reason to my boss to spend the thousands and thousands of dollars to upgrade our 50 production SQL Servers from 2008 to 2012 or 2014. We just completed our last major set of databases (50) from SQL2000 to 2008R2 which was a 2 year project.
I would have to question that statement at least a little bit unless you don't have the source code and thus cannot improve your applications. The Windowing Function enhancements provide for some rather extraordinary performance and concurrency gains on many types of queries. Memory management and NUMA enhancements (now with numerous bug fixes in place) can help with consolidation efforts too if you pursue that. The licensing can be a big pill to swallow though!
Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service
May 19, 2014 at 1:42 pm
TheSQLGuru (5/19/2014)
Markus (5/19/2014)
For the bulk of systems there aren't any additional features in 2012 or 2014 that will make a system run better for us. The biggest feature of SQL2008R2 for me was backup compression was introduced into Standard Edition. That makes MY life easier. Other than support from Microsoft I cannot give any valid reason to my boss to spend the thousands and thousands of dollars to upgrade our 50 production SQL Servers from 2008 to 2012 or 2014. We just completed our last major set of databases (50) from SQL2000 to 2008R2 which was a 2 year project.I would have to question that statement at least a little bit unless you don't have the source code and thus cannot improve your applications. The Windowing Function enhancements provide for some rather extraordinary performance and concurrency gains on many types of queries. Memory management and NUMA enhancements (now with numerous bug fixes in place) can help with consolidation efforts too if you pursue that. The licensing can be a big pill to swallow though!
Most of our systems are software packages purchased so we are at the mercy of the vendor to certify the new version of SQLServer. For home grown database/tables we can upgrade. However, as I watch our Monitor and run SQL Profiler we are certainly not using more than 50% of the resources on most of our SQL Servers. As I capture long running statements run they don't run long and we easily meet customer SLAs. CPUs/IO load, Query times, memory utilization are great. I see no reason to spend the massive amount of $$ to upgrade the SQL engine when no customer is complaining not to mention the huge amount of developer/app folk/server folk, dba support to upgrade everything just for the sake of upgrading. A few of our old Win2003/SQL2000 systems ran just fine as they were... we upgraded them because we HAD to to stay within Microsoft support. Most systems over the last 3-5 years that we have upgraded after we upgrade I go back and ask the customer base how the system is running and ask them specifically if it seems any faster. Most of the time they don't notice any improvement. Some, yes there is improvement especially with the additional memory via 64 bit servers.
To me most low end systems will run fine on any version of SQL Server.... 2005, 2008, 2012, 2014... upgrading it will be un-noticable to the general user. Now that statement wasn't so true all that long ago as server hardware, memory going from 32 bit to 64 bit, faster storage really would speed things up.
May 19, 2014 at 1:58 pm
Kinda what I figured. It does sound like you either have too many servers or more hopefully you are expecting to grow into the ones you have (that are not very heavily loaded from the sound of it).
Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service
May 19, 2014 at 2:04 pm
TheSQLGuru (5/19/2014)
Kinda what I figured. It does sound like you either have too many servers or more hopefully you are expecting to grow into the ones you have (that are not very heavily loaded from the sound of it).
A mixed bag. Some are setup for a requirment of a specific service pack only apps.... some are specific versions of sql server.. some are setup alone for political reasons, some are split up for outage reasons, some are split up for SOX Audit reasons. A group of these are store sales polling servers that the software vendor is specific in wanting their stuff by itself.
A lot of these are very low end systems with a small group of users. Example, an app that is installed on the users PC and has a 300MB SQL Server DB. They have data in the system and drill into it. Very low usage, low volume, low # of users. SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008, 2012, 2014 won't make a bit of difference when they hit their enter key. These types of databases are on general purpose servers with a lot of databases. We are well over 300 databases here.
May 20, 2014 at 4:05 am
Markus (5/19/2014)
TheSQLGuru (5/19/2014)
Kinda what I figured. It does sound like you either have too many servers or more hopefully you are expecting to grow into the ones you have (that are not very heavily loaded from the sound of it).A mixed bag. Some are setup for a requirment of a specific service pack only apps.... some are specific versions of sql server.. some are setup alone for political reasons, some are split up for outage reasons, some are split up for SOX Audit reasons. A group of these are store sales polling servers that the software vendor is specific in wanting their stuff by itself.
A lot of these are very low end systems with a small group of users. Example, an app that is installed on the users PC and has a 300MB SQL Server DB. They have data in the system and drill into it. Very low usage, low volume, low # of users. SQL Server 2000, 2005, 2008, 2012, 2014 won't make a bit of difference when they hit their enter key. These types of databases are on general purpose servers with a lot of databases. We are well over 300 databases here.
Any SQL Express in the mix? I have some clients that have tremendous success there, especially with the 10GB size allowance on more recent SQL editions. One of the clients often winds up with over 1000 databases per server across the express instances on it.
Ahh, SOX ... my condolences!! Got some HIPAA and PCI too for the trifecta?!? :w00t:
Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service
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