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The Voice of the DBA
 

The Minimum Upgrade Point

These days the pace of change with SQL Server can be intimidating. Many of us work in disparate environments with multiple versions of the platform in our environment. In the distant past I've had people note that they often have 2 or 3 versions to support. In the last five or six years, when I've asked it seems that many people have 5 or 6 versions to support. That can be challenging in trying to manage your estate as a single entity and understand which scripts will run on which machines.
 
Recently someone noted on twitter that they tried to convince their company to upgrade to SQL Server 2017, but apparently someone at the company wanted to stick with SQL Server 2014. I asked a question and the person responded that since Dev and QA was at the 2014 compat level, they wanted prod there.
 
Pedro Lopes, from Microsoft, asked a good question: "How can I help you avert this?" I tend to agree, in that moving to 2014 now, which will fall out of mainstream support in July 2019, is silly. You're installing a system that will be unsupported almost from the beginning. While you will get security patches for a few years, it seems short sighted to start using a version that you may want to use for 10 years.
 
That got me thinking. What is the minimum upgrade point for your organization? Not the pace or the need, but if you had to pick some random instance to upgrade, where would you go? SQL Server 2017? Something sooner? Perhaps you have some requirements in your organization that limit you from moving to a very new version. I would argue that it's important dev/test are similar to prod, but I'd also say that dev and test ought to upgrade to a recent version as well.
 
I think I'd specify SQL Server 2016 SP1 as the minimum point. This changed the feature list in Standard Edition, which is what I've often run for systems. We run that now for SQLServerCentral, though our decision last year was a move to 2017. We probably won't upgrade again for many years, but if we did, I think I'd be looking to get close to the most recent version.
 
What would you do?

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Join the debate, and respond to today's editorial on the forums

 
Redgate University
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The Difference Between Rollup and Cube

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Learn about the fundamental differences between the ROLLUP and CUBE operators.

Change Not For Replication Value for SQL Server Identity Columns

Additional Articles from MSSQLTips.com

In this tip we look at how to change the SQL Server setting for a tables identity column to not for replication for existing tables.

Designing Highly Scalable Database Architectures

Additional Articles from SimpleTalk

While architecting cloud native applications, you need to ensure that your system is highly available, performant, scalable, fault tolerant, and has the capability to recover from a disaster scenario. In this article, Samir Behara discusses the options available when designing the database architecture to achieve scalability.

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Can a Certificate’s Private Key be Imported / Restored From a Binary Literal / Hex Bytes ?

Solomon Rutzky from SQLServerCentral

(last updated: 2019-04-22 @ 13:00 EST / 2019-04-22 @ 17:00 UTC ) SQL Server 2012 introduced a significant improvement to CREATE CERTIFICATE: the ability to import a certificate —...

From the SQL Server Central Blogs - Data Breaches: All Your Fault

Grant Fritchey from SQLServerCentral

One part of my job is to understand the compliance landscape. This means that I read a lot about the GDPR and related similar laws. I also have to...

 

 Question of the Day

Today's question (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor):

 

Service Broken Groups

When we group message types and directions together in Service Broken, what are we creating in each database that will send and receive messages?

Think you know the answer? Click here, and find out if you are right.

 

Redgate SQL Provision
 

 

 Yesterday's Question of the Day (by Steve Jones - SSC Editor)

Filtered Statistics

How can I create filtered statistics on a column in a table?

Answer: Add a WHERE clause to your CREATE STATISTICS DDL

Explanation: You can use a WHERE clause with expression(s) just as you would for a filtered index. Ref: CREATE STATISTICS - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/statements/create-statistics-transact-sql?view=sql-server-2017

Discuss this question and answer on the forums

 

 

 

Database Pros Who Need Your Help

Here's a few of the new posts today on the forums. To see more, visit the forums.

TSQL: How to transform first row as column name? - Hello, I hope you are all well. I would like your help on a data transformation task that I have. I would like to convert the first row of a table to a column name I am working on SQL Server Azure and I get daily data from another service.This service loads a table that […]
Date time time zone conversion built in function - I have legacy databases that stores all data in U.S. Central Standard Time.   Some servers are on CST and others are on UTC.  Built-in function getdate() gets date in the server time, while getutcdate() gets date in UTC.  I need a function that will always return date in CST irrespective of the server time. I […]
First Link in DB Pros That Need Your Help is Broken - For the last two days, the first post in the newsletter takes you to a blank page. The post title is "Windows Server 2016 or Windows 10 for SQL server!!!". It takes you to: "https://www.sqlservercentral.com/forums/topic/windows-server-2016-or-windows-10-for-sql-server-2" and it says "Oops! That page can’t be found.".
New code formatting checks - I enter this text first with some questions. Now I enter code CREATE TABLE Claim ( PharmNo VARCHAR(20) , ClaimNo VARCHAR(20) , ClaimDate date ) GO INSERT dbo.Claim (PharmNo, ClaimNo, ClaimDate) VALUES ('ABC', '123', '2019-01-01'), ('ABC', '987', '2019-01-02'), ('DEF', '234', '2019-02-01'), ('HIJ', '343', '2019-03-01') GO SELECT a.*, b.* FROM Claim a INNER JOIN Claim b […]
Redgate sqlbackup problem - Hi all   Was not sure where to post this, so apologies if its not in the right area. I'm trying to create a job which will restore databases using Redgate.   If I execute this, I get an error, but if I just print the @SQL, then paste it after an Exec sqlpbackup, it […]
Get list of files in Azure Data Factory - How do I get a list of files in a directory stored on Azure Blob storage
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Backup Job Performance - I have a Legacy SQL Server 2014 Cluster that had about 2TB worth of database on it.  The Nodes were Physical 16 cores with around Half a TB of RAM in each node.  Only one Instance resides on the instance with around 20 databases on it. These nodes are about 8 years old and the […]
Mirroring and Logshipping from the Production DB - Hi Guru's We currently have a Production DB Server and DB mirrored to our DR DB Server and DB. As a Mirror its is offline and we can't run queries against it. We are getting more and more requests from our Data Science engineer for data for reporting. It's is possible to have log […]
Is it possible to keep the SQL catalogues in place after deleting the data from - Hi...Im working on SQL Server, So I am using a SQL Server database with many tables that store large bits of information that is searchable. These tabled, columns are full text enabled. My issue is I do not need the data in the tables. I only query the catalog but never the actual data. Is […]
How to connect script task variable to Execute sql taskin SSIS - Here is the scenario: I have a Script task which has C# code and it returns a json string and I am storing the string value into a SSIS variable. I am passing this SSIS variable to a Execute sql task and Parse those varaible values into sql server destination. I am not able to […]
replication from EC2 TO RDS AWS - good evening everyone In the context of a migration project Towards RDS I would like to create a transactional replication between a SQL service instance put in premis EC2 and an RDS instance Who has an idea if this type of replication is allowed are there limitations in RDS that prevent the implementation of replication […]
t-sql 2012 string together names separated by a comma - In t-sql 2012, I need to string together lots of names where the end result where each name will be separated by a comma. The final endput result will look like the following: Diane Smith, Ed Clark, James Ragon, Bonnie Fline, Lynn Oster. The maximum length of the names that will be strung together will […]
SQL Database Connection Failure - ProNest 2019 - I'm stumped - any help is appreciated since I'm new to managing anything related to SQL. We're a small business using ProNest (steel plate nesting software). They have an option to setup an SQL database to track inventory. We have 3 users total. I am one of the users as well as the host for […]
How can I make an encrypted backup using assymetric keys - The only way I know of for making an encrypted backup of a database is to 1) create a master key on both the server where the encrypted backup will be made and on the server where it will be restored, 2) create a certificate on the originating server, 3) backup the certificate, 4) make […]
 

 

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