December 20, 2023 at 6:31 pm
FYI Testing an upgrade in place need not be risky. A copy of production can be restored offline. I would "fear" doing an upgrade in place for a production system. Snapshots and restores don't always work as expected.
RandyHelpdesk: Perhaps Im not the only one that does not know what you are doing. 😉
December 21, 2023 at 2:44 am
I would be very curious to know how many people routinely upgrade the _underlying_ operating system.
We're cursed to have a couple of SQL instances on Windows 2016. Nothing is worse than updates on Windows 2016. Has anyone just upgraded the OS in place to say Windows 2019 or 2022? I'd be very curious to hear stories.
December 22, 2023 at 7:38 am
Good, you got most of the point correct.
December 29, 2023 at 7:48 pm
Thank you all for reading and commenting (and dusting off that old account Mike!), it has been a really great variety of viewpoints and experiences to read and I'd say while I'm still a migration guy for now, I wish I wasn't. I've got a 100+ instances slowly being brought forward to SQL 2022 and while they will be much cleaner than they were, doing it all again when SQL 2025 (or whatever) launches just doesn't seem like fun.
January 19, 2024 at 8:22 pm
IME, the issue with in-place upgrades is when they work, they work fine, but when they don't they tend to produce more unusual error states that can be tricky to troubleshoot, and if you're upgrading in-place you're probably in a maintenance window so are working against the clock. The risk of this seems to increase with the level of 'baggage' the server has - e.g. SSRS/SSIS/SSAS, previous in-place upgrades to OS/SQL, bigger version jumps, any other software or extensions involved, etc.
I don't consider rollback risk a big issue anymore on VMs with a well-tested snapshot process - never had any issue with that.
I'll always recommend a migration as first choice if you have the time and resource and the solution allows for it - I believe MS still recommend this too - but in-place is not that bad for simple setups. Or as in some great examples given on this thread, where changing conn strings etc for many connected systems is problematic.
https://sqlrider.net - My technical blog
January 19, 2024 at 8:34 pm
I would be very curious to know how many people routinely upgrade the _underlying_ operating system.
We're cursed to have a couple of SQL instances on Windows 2016. Nothing is worse than updates on Windows 2016. Has anyone just upgraded the OS in place to say Windows 2019 or 2022? I'd be very curious to hear stories.
Been involved in a few upgrades to Win2019 - largely went OK, but recall some GPO/WMI related issues needing attention on the infra side, and for SQL boxes, always needed to use 'mofcomp' to restore Sql Config Manager. Not had any failures with the core upgrade process.
https://sqlrider.net - My technical blog
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