April 19, 2013 at 9:54 am
My company is looking at upgrading to 2012 because we are primarily 2005 now and management wants to get current. It is difficult to say that any new features are driving this.
April 19, 2013 at 10:00 am
We are mainly running 2008 in differing flavours. I have not seen any business reasons that have made me consider the additional cost of the new licensing model for the applications that we serve, although from a technical standpoint there are significant gains with 2012.
All new development is still being based upon 2008 R2 and will be for some time. The extended support lasts to July 2019 and unless there is a feature that is specifically required we will not be looking to upgrade anytime soon.
SQL DBA
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April 19, 2013 at 10:40 am
shaycullen (4/19/2013)
Friday Greetings! 😀The "Always On" high-availibilty cluster is reason enough for us to upgrade our production environment. 🙂
Shay,
I agree, this IMHO is the number one reason to upgrade. ColumnStore indexes, on the other hand, are used primarily for data warehousing large set query performance and while it does enhance perfromance in that area in some cases, in other cases it actually degrades performance from what I am hearing and reading.. But, with that being said, that it is still not a compelling enough reason to upgrade to SQL Server 2012 , particularly with so many shops still not even using data warehousing yet.:-D
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
April 19, 2013 at 10:57 am
It has taken us almost 4 years to get all but 8 production databases off of SQL2000 to 2008R2. Yes, we still have 8 on SQL2000! We have also been upgrading some SQL2005 to 2008 as well. With about 325 production databases I know of very few that are purchased apps that have certified SQL2012. Heck, in January we just installed a new system that we FORCED the vendor to certify Win2008R2/SQL2008R2. They are still running Win2003/SQL2005 in their hosted site and have over 20,000 prod dbs.
We haven't even looked at Win2012 or SQL2012. We are too busy with current and coming projects right now.
April 19, 2013 at 11:03 am
The organization where I now work has experienced substantial pain in the past by not upgrading SQL Server versions. For this reason, it has long been the policy here that we will continuously manage and move up the upgrade path.
I want to echo what several commenters have already said about the length of time it takes to upgrade a production environment. Even though we have a policy which states that we will constantly upgrade, we just succeeded in upgrading our main production instance two weeks ago, almost a year after 2012 was released. Further, we still have many production instances left to upgrade. Some of these will not be upgraded for at least another two years, due to the fact that they support 3rd party applications which themselves do not support 2012.
Given these examples, I believe that a sharp focus on licensing costs is a mistake. Delays in upgrading will lead to deteriorating systems. The longer the upgrade is put off, the more that it will cost in terms of time and effort to eventually upgrade. Systems in such a state are often simply decommissioned.
April 19, 2013 at 11:12 am
To a degree I agree with you. However, with todays new technology a 'system' can live on indefinately with VM. when the old machine is becoming old you simply migrate it to a new VM machine. We still have a handful of old, smaller systems on Win2000 believe it or not. Systems that are used and maybe the vendor has gone out of business but the company still needs the function. We have a handful of systems like that. Some are not necessarily in production but have to be kept for legal reasons up and running.
With the changing of how Microsoft licenses SQL Server it is more difficult to justify an upgrade. Especially for smaller systems that don't require any of the new features like Always On. When I give my boss a quote for the cost and he asks me what do I tell our CIO the justification to upgrade... about all I can say is we will move to a newer version. That isn't much bang for the buck until we are forced to upgrade due to loss of support. We have done a lot of server consolidation but sometimes there is only so much you can do. Most of the times our hands are tied until the vendor certifies the latest version of SQL Server. Then it turns into our IT Dept putting it into the next years budget to upgrade and it not getting cut out of the budget. Then it is do we have the hours in IT for everyone to work on it. It is a never ending cycle.
April 19, 2013 at 11:20 am
milzs (4/19/2013)
We're a US government (US Air Force) organization and we'll be sticking with 2008 R2 for the forseeable future. My specific application runs using SQL 2008 on three different networks, all of different classification levels. In order for us to upgrade anything we have to get Information Assurance and the security officers to approve the new software for all three networks. That's typically a nightmare. Fortunately SQL is US-owned software so the process is much simpler. Getting software developed by foreign-owned companies approved is nearly impossible.
Similar situation, we are currently migrating to 2008 R2.
April 19, 2013 at 11:28 am
We're trying to upgrade from SQL 2005 to SQL 2012 and figure that just bypassing SQL 2008/R2 makes sense because of that. We'll be able to take advantage of a lot of features that are new to us, but not sure how many 2012-only features we'll use right away. I'm sure we'll work in some windowing functions and at least consider Always-On a little more, but the biggest thing I see us using sooner is filtered indexes.
April 19, 2013 at 12:18 pm
Peter Schott (4/19/2013)
....not sure how many 2012-only features we'll use right away.I'm sure we'll work in some windowing functions and at least consider Always-On a little more, but the biggest thing I see us using sooner is filtered indexes.
Filtered Indexes are not new to SQL 2012. They were introduced in SQL 2008. 😀
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
April 19, 2013 at 12:20 pm
TravisDBA (4/19/2013)
Peter Schott (4/19/2013)
I'm sure we'll work in some windowing functions and at least consider Always-On a little more, but the biggest thing I see us using sooner is filtered indexes.Filtered Indexes are not new to SQL 2012. They were introduced in SQL 2008. 😀
Correct, but they're also in 2012, so they'll be new to us for production use. 🙂 I didn't mean to imply that it was a new in 2012 feature, just newer than 2005.
April 19, 2013 at 3:59 pm
David.Poole (4/19/2013)
...I'm going to say something contraversial here. You can do cold hard financial logical analysis of cost vs benefits and put forward a recommendation but if your business people read about a fabulous new feature that will solve all their problems then somehow fact based cost analysis goes out of the window. Even if the facts say don't the "feeling" is do. A bit of a double-edged sword that one so make sure you are holding the handle.
+1
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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April 19, 2013 at 6:25 pm
David.Poole (4/19/2013)
I'm going to say something contraversial here. You can do cold hard financial logical analysis of cost vs benefits and put forward a recommendation but if your business people read about a fabulous new feature that will solve all their problems then somehow fact based cost analysis goes out of the window. Even if the facts say don't the "feeling" is do. A bit of a double-edged sword that one so make sure you are holding the handle.
AMEN!
I know someone in management that was telling everyone he could about how relational databases are a thing of the past, because he read an article on Mongo DB and No Sql. It didn't make a bit of sense to argue the point. Sometimes you just grin and bear it.
Dave
April 19, 2013 at 7:48 pm
djackson 22568 (4/19/2013)
I know someone in management that was telling everyone he could about how relational databases are a thing of the past, because he read an article on Mongo DB and No Sql. It didn't make a bit of sense to argue the point. Sometimes you just grin and bear it.
Anytime I hear anyone mention Mongo DB I always flash to this video* in my mind.
I work in a different area than the CIO and management. I was support of hosted customer DBs and our software as opposed to our internal systems. About a year ago the CIO was asked about implementing Hadoop[/url] and was considering it. I showed him that video and somehow the idea was quietly dropped.
* - Notice that the video is barely safe for work because of profanity and you will be laughing your posterior off.
----------------
Jim P.
A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.
April 22, 2013 at 3:45 am
Staying on an old version of a product has a cost.
Any cost/benefit analysis about moving to a new version of a product should include the costs of staying on an old version, otherwise it is not a blanced analysis.
New versions of products such as SQL Server tend to be more reliable than older versions. This means less unplanned downtime. This mans less cost to the business.
New versions of 'interesting' produts such as SQL Server help in staff attraction and retention. This means less recruitment. This means less cost to the business.
New versions of products such as SQL Server have features that may become useful to the business. Upgrading before they are needed means the IT department can support business change rather than being a brake on it. This means being able to exploit the right time to market. This means growth to the business.
If a cost/benefit analysis focusses on the downside of upgrading, then the organisation risks being bypassed by its competitors.
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
April 22, 2013 at 5:25 am
Oh I don't know. Hypothetical situation. The cost of upgrading if we had all of our dbs on SQL2005 to 2008 to the company would be tremendous. Licenses, hardware, dba time, application folks testing, outage time to do the actual upgrade.. We have 40 servers right now with about 300 dbs. If my boss asks me what is the benefit in spending, say, three quarters of a mill to do this I cannot say we will get that much in savings by upgrading. What if we wait and jump from SQL2005 to 2012 just to stay on a Microsoft supported version and jump over SQL2008. We don't have more than a handful of mid to large dbs here. Most are quite small and won't take advantage of any new features. In SQL 2008R2 the one big benefit I like is using the COMPRESS backup. But, again, for small to midsized dbs that isn't much of a help.
I know of a LOT of companies that are simply jumping over a version... much like the Windows PC operating system. I doubt many companies will upgrade to Win8... heck we are still finishing up upgrading folks to Win7. Last month I was finally upgraded from XP to Win7.
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