October 20, 2008 at 9:33 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Is It Worth Upgrading to SQL Server 2008
October 20, 2008 at 10:19 pm
It sounds like M$ is giving us another hard boiled egg. I'm very disappointed in 2005 to begin with, as 2000 had features that aren't even native to 2005. For instance, Importing data was so much easier in 2000. Now all my DTS' are pretty much worthless unless I want to combine a 2000 package with the 2005 and then I still have to perform most of the work manually.
I was also disappointed in your article. You basically gave us a short summary of whats new and whats lacking but couldn't deliver the money shot when it came to saying 2008 is garbage so don't get it.
I mean come on, you basically asked at the end of the article what we thought... Gee, When I read the title of the post in my email I thought you were gonna tell me what I clicked thru to find out.
October 21, 2008 at 1:34 am
As a new author I appreciate your article. But the article failed to provide a clear cut answer why we should upgrade to 2008 from 2005. Our company has no plan to upgrade as our Servers are very stable. 2008 is not providing features which makes one to jump for upgradation. 🙂
October 21, 2008 at 1:46 am
Hi...
There are some very compelling reasons to upgrade to SQL Server 2008. I'll cover a few here but haven't got a huge amount of time so apologies for appearing curt:
Improved ETL performance with Persistent Lookups and Increased Parallelism
Merge statement and change data capture which is highly valuable if you've ever tried to bulid a warehouse
Please see my blogs at: http://community.altiusconsulting.com/blogs/altiustechblog/archive/2008/09/03/sql-server-2008-part-1-ssis-pipeline-scalability.aspx
On the SSAS side it now does subspace computation automatically i.e. doesn't calculate over sparse cells which could make a significant difference to calculation bottlenecks. The tool improvements in SSAS will help developers to build better performing cubes.
The most compelling reason to upgrade your relational engine is that it now does compression on the IO. Intuitively you might think that this will slow it down. However in some cases it caused an increase in performance since with 64 bit servers packed full of memory it is the IO that is now the bottle neck. Freeing up this bottle neck by using compression can imrpove performance.
If you're buying SQL 2005 then I'd definitely skip to 2008 since it has a legacy clause meaning that you can use 2005 (I think there are some conditions). So buy 2008 use the bits from 2005 you want and upgrade when you're ready. They'll run side by side.
There are many more improvements that I'm hoping to detail in my blogs.
October 21, 2008 at 1:58 am
Anirban Paul (10/21/2008)
As a new author I appreciate your article. But the article failed to provide a clear cut answer why we should upgrade to 2008 from 2005. Our company has no plan to upgrade as our Servers are very stable. 2008 is not providing features which makes one to jump for upgradation. 🙂
Wasn't that kinda the whole point of the article? There are no clear cut reasons to upgrade from 2005 to 2008 unless you're running Enterprise Edition.
Good article, I liked it and the scope of it is very relevant to where I am now. Likewise, I can't see any real reason to upgrade to 2008 at the moment
(although it might make some of the QOTDs easier 😛 )
October 21, 2008 at 4:34 am
With our new server we installed SQL Server 2008 Standard.
I haven't even scratched the surface of it's features (SSIS, etc) but I LOVE the InteliSense that SQL Server 2008 has.
It is now painful to switch back to 2000 or even 2005 because I've gotten spoiled with 08's InteliSense.
October 21, 2008 at 4:47 am
I think the SQL Server 2000 SE to SQL Server 2005 SE upgrade gave us a lot of cool new features and I think people were quite rightly expecitng the same with the SQL Server 2005 SE to SQL 2008 SE. I was disappointed that most of the new features are only in Enterprise Edition.
I guess if you can upgrade for free then it would be beneficial. However i'm not sure the cost is justified if your already on SQL Server 2005 SE and have to pay for an upgrade to SQL Server 2008 SE, especially the per-processor licenses.
Good article though !!
October 21, 2008 at 5:03 am
good article I thought and I am in agreement about how cool it was that a lot of scalability features were included in SQL 2005 standard edition (we use standard exclusively).
Interesting to hear that 2008 standard offers us little extra for everyday use, and helps confirm our decision to upgrade to 2005 rather than 2008, this decision being based on 2008 being too new and our account manager saying we would be charged to go from 2000 to 2008, but 2000 to 2005 is free! Still don't understand why that is the case.
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October 21, 2008 at 5:10 am
one thing i learned about MS the hard way:
never upgrade before SP3 comes out
October 21, 2008 at 5:22 am
allen (10/21/2008)
With our new server we installed SQL Server 2008 Standard.I haven't even scratched the surface of it's features (SSIS, etc) but I LOVE the InteliSense that SQL Server 2008 has.
It is now painful to switch back to 2000 or even 2005 because I've gotten spoiled with 08's InteliSense.
OK.. I'll agree on the Intellisense.. But I'm not about to sell SQL 2008 to my clients based on the fact that it makes development work for me easier. Pretty much all of my clients are on 2005, unless they're stuck with applications that don't work in 2005 and have to stay with 2000 until their developers pull their thumbs out. (I've one or two like that, the most recent one was last weekend, had to do a quick U turn and downgrade again because their application developers had missed a trick!) But I'm upgrading users to 2005, and not 2008, even if the livcence allows them to go to 2008. I don't see the point in jumping into a new, untried product when 2005 is so stable, and there are no useful features in SQL 2008 Standard. 2005 is tried, tested, and stable, so unless MS bring out a service patch that releases some of the enterprise features into Standard, I'm not going down that road, there's no financial benifit to the client, which is where the buck stops.
October 21, 2008 at 5:44 am
I agree that they really over weighted the new features to the Enterprise Edition. I think it's silly to expect me (or anyone) to pay 10 times the prices for EE vs SE just to get compression. If MySql had decent developer tools and a clear future I'd probably bail on Microsoft. If they want to keep getting my money maybe they'll throw me a few bones because MySql will probably get its act together soon.
October 21, 2008 at 6:02 am
One big item the author missed was SQL 2008 Filestream. Instead of filling your DB with images, etc... you can use FileStream to map these images through the DB. They can live on a file system instead of in your DB. Apparently this functionality has existed in Oracle and Microsoft has finally caught on. This is especially useful for web-based DB's where you can reference all kind of backend files.
There seems to be a debate about whether filling your DB with things like images is a good idea. Just because you can put all kinds of stuff in your DB, is it a good idea?
http://blogs.msdn.com/pedram/archive/2007/06/04/store-any-data-in-sql-server-2008-katmai.aspx
October 21, 2008 at 6:09 am
Good article ! I guess I did not realize all of those goodie features in SQL 2008 were in Enterprise Edition. Yikes ! Your article was an eye opener. I guess I never really thought about it in the way you presented it. We have mostly SQL 2000 here, just a few SQL 2005 because we cannot justify moving to SQL 2005 with 2008 now out.
October 21, 2008 at 6:19 am
We use Litespeed for SQL Server for backups and I was hoping to see those features included with SQL 2008 Standard (e.g. backup compression/encryption). I also hope to see the old "disable foreign key" feature return to the data copy wizard. As of now, I don't see any reason to upgrade from 2005 Standard to 2008 Standard.
October 21, 2008 at 6:43 am
The most compelling reason of all to upgrade is if it makes business sense. If a software product uses it or there are some features that make your organization more efficient and more profitable, then upgrade. We are running a combination of SQL Server 2000 & 2005 primarily because the critical business software runs on them. When the software running on 2000 upgrades to 2005/2008, we will upgrade.
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