Upgrading to 2012?

  • Is it worth upgrading from SQL Server 2008 R2 Developer to 2012 Developer?

    I believe most companies are still using SQL Server 2008 or 2005...

  • It depends on what you need to support. You can have an instance of both versions of the database engine and SQL Agent installed side-by-side. Just be careful when in comes to SSIS, installing SQL 2012 can mess with the DLLs needed in BIDS 2008.

    There are no special teachers of virtue, because virtue is taught by the whole community.
    --Plato

  • Thanks. I think you read my mind!

    My experience of uninstalling SQL Server 2005 and then installing 2008 R2 wasn't wonderful. This meant I had to reinstall my home operating system, which is why I asked this question in the first place.

    I am not sure how quick or keen businesses will be to upgrade to 2012...

  • SQL Server 2012 offers a lot of great new functionality but with upgrading comes cost and companies are typically slow to shell out the money if the current system supports their business. The thing most hampering sales of SQL Server 2012 in my opinion is how feature-rich and stable of a product SQL 2005 and SQL 2008 have proven to be. I think new projects will tend to be funded with SQL Server 2012 as the product but upgrades may come at a slower rate until new features catch on and IT departments can use them as selling points to upper management to justify the cost.

    There are no special teachers of virtue, because virtue is taught by the whole community.
    --Plato

  • That sounds like a pretty accurate analysis.

    I also guess that in this time of austerity, IT departments will have to provide very good reasons to upgrade.

    Some of the databases I used were constructed by firms using SQL Server 2005 as a back end, so I guess it would be a major decision for them to upgrade to 2008/R2 or 2012 as they would have to pass on the additional costs to their clients.

  • meridius10 (1/1/2013)


    Some of the databases I used were constructed by firms using SQL Server 2005 as a back end, so I guess it would be a major decision for them to upgrade to 2008/R2 or 2012 as they would have to pass on the additional costs to their clients.

    Most of the third party apps tha rely on SQL Server that I have supported have appeared to drag their feet when it came to certifying their product on newer versions. In the worst case only when a product version was about to be end-of-lifed by Microsoft in terms of support did the company finally certify their software for use with a newer version. The sad thing is that the upgrade path from 2005 to 2012 is actually quite smooth. Not many mainstream use-cases that run 2005 will have much trouble running on 2012.

    There are no special teachers of virtue, because virtue is taught by the whole community.
    --Plato

  • We sell software to the Healthcare industry (mainly NHS in the UK) and our customers are usually really slow to adopt new versions.

    However, we've got half a dozen of customers who are moving to SQL 2012 from SQL 2000. They've never wanted 2005/2008/2008R2 as they didn't see the benefit!

    I think SQL 2012 adoption will really pickup this year so it would be good to be prepared.

  • We upgraded the SQL instances that serve our web applications to SQL 2012 last year, as part of our migration to AWS.

    Over the years we had upgraded from SQL 2000 to 2005, then to 2008 and by 2011 we were running everything on SQL 2008 R2. The migration from SQL 2008 R2 to SQL 2012 was the least troublesome of all that we have done.

    We are looking forward to upgrading our BI stack to SQL 2012 and SharePoint Online in March/April, as the SQL 2012 BI stack is significantly improved over previous versions.

    If you want to see how a site that runs on AWS and delivers over 2 million page hits per day performs, visit http://www.totaljobs.com

    Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.

    When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara

  • Ed, were your non-troublesome upgrades from 2008 R2 to 2012 done by ungrading existing instances, installing new names-instances side by side and migrating the DBs or by migrating DBs to new hardware with 2012 installed?

  • Our SQL 2012 upgrade was done as part of a migration to AWS. This had much the same experience as moving to a new conventional data centre, except that we could concentrate on just building the Windows and SQL instances we needed and did not have to worry about getting kit racked up and cabled.

    We built a parallel environment in AWS, spread over two Availability Zones for resilience. We used SQL P2P replication within our old DCs and within AWS, but network capacity limits at our DCs meant we had to use standard Transactional replication from the DCs to AWS to keep AWS up-to-date with our live site.

    We did have one unexpected SQL issue after cutover, due to a bug in Full Text search. Microsoft found us a workaround, and we are hopeful the next CU will include a fix for the underlying problem. Apart from this, I do not recall any issues related to the move to SQL 2012.

    We hope to share the story of our move to AWS at SQLBits XI, so please vote for http://sqlbits.com/Sessions/Event11/AWSome-Totaljobs_moves_to_the_cloud4 if you want to hear more.

    Original author: https://github.com/SQL-FineBuild/Common/wiki/ 1-click install and best practice configuration of SQL Server 2019, 2017 2016, 2014, 2012, 2008 R2, 2008 and 2005.

    When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor they call me a communist - Archbishop Hélder Câmara

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