Upgrade from SQL2000 to SQL2008 - with less effort in green zone

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Upgrade from SQL2000 to SQL2008 - with less effort in green zone

Attila-378403

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Points: 325
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August 14, 2009 at 2:46 am

#385185

Hi,
We have SQL2000 default instances, and would like to upgrade to SQL2008.
The green zone is at the weekends, and we would like to avoid working on Sat / Sun. 🙂
So I'm thinking about a solutoin, which requires the less effort in the green zone.
-We could go with the in-place upgrade - but testing everything etc could be done in the greenzone only
-We could install a Named SQL2008 instance, set up / test everything, and in the green zone I'd need to only restoring the DB, which is relatively fast. But at the end I'll have a named instance instead of default, and maybe it can cause problems later.
My question is:
-Can I have a SQL2000 and SQL2008 default instances (with different ports, of course) in the same time on a box?
-What are the drawbacks of using SQL2008 named instance as a default instance? (is it possible? .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 ASP applicatoins are the main clients)
-Any other idea how to solve this situation?
Thank you!

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736212 More actions · Answer 1

Attila (8/14/2009)
My question is:
-Can I have a SQL2000 and SQL2008 default instances (with different ports, of course) in the same time on a box?
-What are the drawbacks of using SQL2008 named instance as a default instance? (is it possible? .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0 ASP applicatoins are the main clients)
-Any other idea how to solve this situation?

1, no

2. none really. It's the client that has to know to connect. Note that if you do this, I'd set up a standard port for the instance in Config manager, don't let the server assign it on startup.

3. Set up a 2nd server, install, test, switch the IPs/names in the green zone (after restore). If you have similar sized servers, round robin over a number of weekends (servera -> new server, serverb ->servera, etc)

Attila-378403 Old Hand Points: 325 More actions · Answer 2

Thanks.

Unfortunately we don't have a "spare" server to do a "round robin"..:-(

What if the client doesn't know the instance name, just connects to the correct oprt? Can it cause problems?

Thank you again.

Elliott Whitlow SSC Guru Points: 102402 More actions · Answer 3

If they know the port then instance name should not be important. However I believe this to be a generally bad practice and limits the ability to change the port if needed. There aren't a lot of reasons (there are some though) to make the actual port known.

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