2015 should be a very busy year for most DBAs, due to the end of support of SQL server 2005 coming in April 2016, this year will be the year of upgrade!

Sadly, many organizations are still having SQL 2005 in their production environment from various reasons, from lack of budget to vendor application limitation. However, this will have to be change this year due to the end of extended support coming in 2016. Whether you like it or not, the product has been out for 10 years and its hitting the end of its supporting lift cycle, it should be time to move on and get the new tech ready and speed up all the slow report that you currently running.

I won't go into details of the upgrade, but a few things I would like to highlight:

1. Plan for your upgrade
    Its the beginning of 2015 now, and you only have 1 year to go, if you haven't start planning yet, you better do it soon. From getting management approval, getting the hardware and licenses, installing and testing, business sign off, it will easily takes you 6 - 9 months. Not to mention if the application requires an upgrade along the way as well. So if you still haven't plan for it, most likely you will miss the deadline.

2. Run tools to help you
    There are many tools out there to help for upgrade, no matter its a in-place upgrade or parallel upgrade, you still need to do some kind to pre and post test, that's where those tools comes in. Some free ones from Microsoft such as upgrade advisor can help. At least it give you some high level on what needs to be address and a good starting point to report how much work is required.

3. Trust your DBAs
   You have to trust your DBA that they know what they are doing, get them involves in all meetings even if its application level discussion. They will need to know each and every detail of the plan to make it smooth and successful. If you don't trust your DBA, why do you hire them in the first place 🙂

4. Break things down and address them with priority
    Often times we will hit different issues with upgrades, things like hardware might not be supported, functions that got discontinued, application does not support a given version so on and so forth. List out all issues and address them with priority, thing might need time to address such as hardware, due with that first as the ordering of it and putting to your data center take times. Once you get that out of the way, you can use the time of waiting to get the other things done.

5. Do test upgrade
    Test, test, test, once you complete, test it again!!! Do need to make sure all the functions works in the new testing environment before the actual migration. This might need to work closely with the application team and users, however, this is one of the most important step that is needed.

I can foresee lots will be going in the SQL world this year and upgrade will be in the top listed items, hop everyone started their planning and happy upgrading.