One of the things on my todo list for this past week was to upgrade a SQL 2005 Standard Instance to Enterprise Edition. I was doing it remote, and started up the install, forgetting – until reminded by the installer – that you have to use SKUUpgrade = 1 when launching setup. To me, that’s just annoying, they couldn’t build it into the installer? So I throw together a one line batch file (just in case), add the parameter, still get the warning. Ah, must be case sensitive. Try again, no warning this time, make it further along and then get an error that BPA failed (I’m guessing BPA = best practice advisor, but all it said was BPA). It runs a bit longer, then returns “UpgradeAdvisor returned –1”.
Figuring out arcane errors is not what I want to do on Sunday morning. Do a quick search, find a couple suggestions, plus Error while running 2005 upgrade advisor and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916760. Turns out the copying the BPA files from Bin to the main folder fixed the error. How annoying is that?
Near the end is the reminder to install the latest service pack, as installing the upgrade will overwrite the files you already had there. I get that, sort of. I’ve never dug in deep to see, do the DLL’s really differ from Standard to Enterprise, or is it ultimately just a registry key? I wish it was the latter, because the whole idea of what is basically a full install just to move up (or down, in theory) editions seems like a lot of risk and time. It’s also downtime. Not a big deal in this case, but interesting to think that you have to have a fair amount of down time to move up to an edition that will help you solve a problem.
