January 13, 2023 at 8:34 am
Hi Experts,
We are planning to upgrade our SQL Servers from 2014 to higher version.Which is the best suitable upgrade 2019 or 2022, please advise.
Regards
January 13, 2023 at 12:18 pm
Hi,
if you are able to use the sql server 2022, just watch the lifecycle of the products:
sql server 2019:
Mainstream End Date: Feb 28, 2025
Extended End Date: Jan 8, 2030
sql server 2022
Mainstream End Date: Jan 11, 2028
Extended End Date: Jan 11, 2033
Kind regards,
Andreas
January 13, 2023 at 1:51 pm
If you're going through the pain of an upgrade anyway, just go to the latest version. Is 2022 wildly and in every possible way superior to 2019? No. However, 2022 has everything that is in 2019, plus more. Also, as Andreas points out, your support life is way longer with 2022. Further, going to 2019 won't be any easier than going to 2022. Your process, from testing to final execution, will be the same.
Just go to 2022.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
January 13, 2023 at 3:57 pm
Hi Experts,
We are planning to upgrade our SQL Servers from 2014 to higher version.Which is the best suitable upgrade 2019 or 2022, please advise.
Regards
Quick question, are you migrating to new hardware or are you doing an upgrade on existing hardware?
😎
January 14, 2023 at 8:01 am
All good answers here. I would add:
DBASupport
January 16, 2023 at 8:05 pm
2022. Worst case, use compatibility mode, but don't give up 3 years of support now, especially as no one should be selling 2019 at cost. You'd be buying 2022 and using downgrade rights.
January 31, 2023 at 6:47 pm
I am a little curious here if the people recommending 2022 have an insight I am just missing.
SQL 2019 was an absolute mess for quite some time and seems relatively stable now but am still not sure if I trust it given the potentially serious implications, they just made to the log backup file format in CU16. Obviously that issue is in the past now, but that issue still gives me pause on whether or not they do some other feature update that can break still supported patch levels of SQL.
Can Microsoft really be trusted to get it right this early on? They certainly were not deserving of that trust when 2019 was at this point in its lifecycle and somehow the documentation for 2022 seems even worse than it is for 2019.
January 31, 2023 at 7:26 pm
I'm sorry, but I don't recall 2019 being a big mess. Most of the people I know who upgraded to it were happy. Were there issues? Sure. As with anything. However, it took 2 months before there was a CU released. Couldn't have been that bad. 2017 was just over two months. 2016 was under two months. Doesn't seem like 2019 was spectacularly bad.
The thing to remember is, Microsoft didn't release SQL Server 2022 back in November. They had already been running it on Azure for months before that. With more databases on it than any of us will EVER manage, Azure, and Microsoft being forced to literally use their own dogfood to make money, has changed the way SQL Server releases come out the door. It's Azure First. Always. Which means, when they do accumulate a bunch of changes, that release is pretty darned well tested.
They're human and screw up, same as anyone, but overall, I've found the last three major releases of SQL Server to be remarkably stable. This is especially when compared to what things were like in the old days with SQL Server.
And I'm unsure where you're seeing such bad documentation. The new stuff was well documented over a year before the release (I was taking part in the betas and at least one alpha). I used a lot of it as basis for experimentation in order to write the book on query tuning. I was happy with it.
"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood"
- Theodore Roosevelt
Author of:
SQL Server Execution Plans
SQL Server Query Performance Tuning
January 31, 2023 at 7:38 pm
I don't know that I consider SQL Server 2019 a mess. There were some CU bugs, and the CU16 log format was a breaking, intentional change. I don't like how they rolled that out or messaged it, but I don't think this was a problem with technical ability.
Any piece of software you buy, or even OSS ones that you use, will have breaking changes at times, and have bugs. The question is more how quickly are things fixed or how reliable can the people providing the software be for your organization.
I always suspect that a CU may have a bug in it. Most of the time, the vast majority, they don't have big issues that affect many people. Any individual installation can be affected, which is way lots of people don't patch. I tend to wait a month or two before applying any CU for this reason. I'd prefer someone else find the bug that is willing to deal with it. I tend not to aim to be bleeding edge, and I try to avoid new features until they've had some time to mature. YMMV
The log format was a change you have to work around and prepare for. If you are mostly CU15, then I wouldn't think about CU16 or later until you were prepared to upgrade most systems. Otherwise, the problems with restores and trying to ensure I maintain a RPO/RTO are hard.
I don't recall SQL Server 2019 having major bugs prior to CU2. There were some, but usually affecting specific situations, and I could look at any new version of an RDBMS with a few bugs. There were some windows issues with ODBC, but I wouldn't call those SQL Server bugs. There is a filestream issue as well. Might be more, but I don't see reports of major issues.
Any CU is as likely as any other to introduce an issue. That isn't a reason to not choose a version, as every version has issues. The bigger issue in recommending SQL Server 2022 is support. If you are working on a system that runs on SQL 2016-2017, then likely you aren't using or aiming for SQL 2022 features. Likely your system will run fine with an upgrade. If you are building something new, I'd be wary of 1.0 features, but I wouldn't want to give up 3 years of support.
February 1, 2023 at 12:29 am
Addressing breaking changes through patch management is fine - but not when there are security and/or compliance requirements that also intersect with periodic, large organizational change freezes, strict maintenance windows and a required lag time before applying a patch. Holding back one patch can quickly snowball into missing multiples even if you can count on the next one being totally problem free - and it may not be.
What happened with the agent in CU2, and snapshots/integrity checks in CU7 absolutely never should have shipped. Both were serious bugs that were not edge cases. These were very low-quality bugs that maybe MS didn't experience not needing to rely on the SQL agent to run SQL as a service, or rely on snap shots.
I would concede that some of the bugs I was concerned about in 2019 could be worked around by reducing compatibility or disabling UDF in-lining, but if I were in a place where I was really looking to some new SQL features to solve a problem I have, I would be pretty disappointed to have them scaled back temporarily by new patches or have to turn them off to make the SQL server function reliably. If I am doing that, then I don't know what the point of going to the bleeding edge is when I don't get access to those features anyways and I possibly have bugs like SQL 2019 CU2 and CU7 to look forward to. It's not like at this point if you license SQL server 2019 or 2017 that you are licensing a version of SQL that will only be good until 2030, you are downgrading from 2022 and getting access to a SQL license until 2033 that can be upgraded later.
currently the CU16 thing actually bothers me more about 2019 than either CU2 or CU7. I am ok with waiting a little bit for a new product to stabilize but CU16 just broke things in heavily log shipped environments and they didn't even offer a hotfix for CU14 and 15, both of which were still supported patch levels for another 4 months after that.
February 1, 2023 at 3:44 pm
You're complaining a bit about your process with Microsoft's. My point is that any platform will have bugs and issues, and any patch can cause issues. Microsoft has done a good job where most of their patches are fine. If you hold one, you can skip it and move to the next, so that delay isn't enough that impacts compliance, at least not for most companies worldwide.
I don't agree with Microsoft's decision to break things in CU16, and I'm not defending their performance in testing CU2. I'm saying that this is a part of the world and I don't think this means 2022 is more or less likely to encounter any issues on any particular patch. I would take the extra support time, especially in a compliance regulated environment, over 3 less years of support.
June 9, 2023 at 8:49 pm
try in CMD with administrative privileges setup.exe /ACTION=UPGRADE
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