January 9, 2009 at 6:54 am
Hi!
Now that SP3 is here, I'm going to upgrade. I was wondering if anybody has a recommended procedure for installing service packs? I cant seem to find anything useful on the net. Do people just double-click and see cross fingers, or do you create a whole testing environment etc?
regards
Obs
January 9, 2009 at 8:21 am
Its useful and safe if you test it in separate test environment before you attack production. Don't ever forget to take system and user databases backup prior to SP installation.
MJ
January 9, 2009 at 9:03 am
Backup your databases in a test environment and run it there. you should have a test environment. If you don't, install a VM system and create a test environment.
The idea is that you should try to closely replicate the activity on a test environment and see if everything still works. You can use Profiler to capture activity and then run that against a test system, run all your jobs, etc.
Typically I haven't necessarily tested every instance, especially when we have had hundreds. We might run tests against a sample set of instances and see if things still work, and we would test against critical systems.
January 9, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Apply to a non prod SQL Server first that is at the same SQL Server build set as your production.. meaning same service pack level and if you have any hotfixes applied too.
First off stop all application connections, backup ALL databases including master, model, msdb.
Second, shutdown ALL of the SQL Server services and make a manual copy of the master,msdb, model .mdf and .ldf files.
Third, stop all un-neccessary services on that server... Anti-Virus, IIS, Backup software, SMTP, etc..
Then apply the Service pack and reboot.
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