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RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

jarick 15608 — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 08:07:42 GMT

What I heard is that when you have SA and 2008 CPU licenses, MS will convert that to how many cores you have installed, if you have a total of 2, 4 core CPU's, you will get 8 core licenses with 2012 in SA. Correct me if I am wrong but I would upgrade my servers to as many cores as the socket count would allow to get as many cores as you need. This is the same licensing model as Oracle and Sybase ASE.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

gmelhaff — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 12:18:44 GMT

The simple solution to the licensing issue was to get 2008 for proc with SA, then you could upgrade to 2012 at no charge and stay on per proc licensing.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

onlygoodones — Fri, 08 Jun 2012 13:08:41 GMT

We have Sql 2008 and the operations we are doing right now can also be done with SQL 2005. I am sure Microsoft will come up with SQL 2014 in couple of years. if our company grows and needs all those advanced features, we will look at it.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Dale Turley — Wed, 16 May 2012 05:45:55 GMT

Becuase of the new licensing structure for 2012 compared to 2008, where one license per processor was required to now needing 1 license per core then an upgrade to MS SQL Server 2012 isn't on the cards We are looking for an alternative at the moment...

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Marios Philippopoulos — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:24:02 GMT

We are itching to upgrade our critical production servers to SQL 2012 to take advantage of AlwaysOn Availability Groups for HA/DR. At the moment we use Windows clustering for HA and db mirroring for DR, and have resorted to an in-house solution for keeping server-level settings in sync between prod and DR. The new SQL 2012 features seem a perfect fit for us.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Dave Schutz — Tue, 01 May 2012 07:28:50 GMT

We are currently on SQLServer 2008R2 and it is working nicely. Probably will not change for awhile due to:Waiting until SP1 comes along, waiting until our vendor app is approved for upgrade, we are a small shop and see no big benefit from upgrading, I'm the only DBA and have enough work to do already, plus I have to justify the upgrade in the budget in some future year.Other than that I'm all for upgrading. :-)

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

bitbucket-25253 — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:54:03 GMT

[quote]David.Poole Posted Today @ 3:16 PMIs the developer version out yet?[/quote]Ordered my copy early this morning from Amazon,delivery [quote]Monday, May 7, 2012 [/quote]Price Shipment Total: $56.26 -- includes shipping via US Mail.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

dma-669038 — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:07:43 GMT

As far as resumes and interviews go, it is good to say you know something about the new product. but it ends there. I have attended more interviews where folks want and keep old versions and couldn't care less how much of the new one you know. But as a technologist i find this stance very discouraging. Go the pass conference this year, for example, and you wont see much on any earlier versions. Those of us who are on earlier versions are considered old in the techie community no matter how many reasons you list out. It is the hot new savvy consulting guys who get to showcase their work and in some cases also move on ahead.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

jarick 15608 — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:57:14 GMT

We do backups to tape using Netbackup and SQL 2012 is not supported by Symantec yet. Does anyone have a release date for that one?

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

David.Poole — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:16:47 GMT

In the DW world the new column stores present a compelling case but if you are not in the DW world what problems does SQL2012 solve for you? Emphasis on the "YOU".Another consideration is the versions you currently have to support. It's a pain to have to support 2000, 2005, 2008 and 2008R2 because you constantly have to context switch.Replication behaves one way for 2000, and differently in 2008.SSIS goes tits up between 2005 & 2008.Security actually works properly from 2005SP2.Combine the version numbers with service pack levels and the thought of introducing yet another version without deprecating or migrating off an old version just doesn't apeal.If I can say migrate and consolidate will save you money due to fewer machines, fewer licenses and longevity of your SAN due to lower IO in your DW then I've got a strong case.If I say that scarce resource will be freed for the projects the business want to enact in 2012 then I'm in with a chance.If I say that it will make my pain go away then their threshold for my pain is incredibly high!Is the developer version out yet?Bless me but I'm still running XP at home quite happily and my PC is too old to run Windows 7. There's a recession on and I can't afford to replace a machine that continues to work absolutely fine with SQL2008, Office2010, fireFox etc.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Evil Kraig F — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 12:49:34 GMT

[quote][b]TravisDBA (4/30/2012)[/b][hr]This kind of puts people into a quandary because on the one hand the business for whatever reason(s) is not ready for the upgrade, and then on the other hand keeping up with the technology is put on hold, and as a result your resume tends to fall behind. Almost as soon as a new SQL version is out, companies start looking for it on your resume. This happened not only for SQL2008, but for SQL 2008R2 too. I suspect it will also happen for SQL 2012 shortly as well.:-D[/quote]Sometimes I have to wonder if this is considered an unexpected bonus to companies. It doesn't drive their decisions to upgrade/not upgrade, but is considered an unexpected bonus when it works in their favor.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

TravisDBA — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:25:28 GMT

This kind of puts people into a quandary because on the one hand the business for whatever reason(s) is not ready for the upgrade, and then on the other hand keeping up with the technology is put on hold, and as a result your resume tends to fall behind. Almost as soon as a new SQL version is out, companies start looking for it on your resume. This happened not only for SQL2008, but for SQL 2008R2 too. I suspect it will also happen for SQL 2012 shortly as well.:-D

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Cris E — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:18:48 GMT

[i]Although I've got hard evidence to back me up, I would be willing to bet that Microsoft's change in the licensing model will result in slower than usual migrations to SQL Server 2008.[/i]This is big around our company. We run a few very large databases and a swarm of smaller ones and right now management is locked in a struggle over that very topic. One wants to go forward, others do not want to spend money, it's cheaper to go this way now, some can't take the disruption until fall, etc etc. In the past the money wasn't really a big part of the planning, but now the technical and project planning aspects are definitely not driving things.The larger problem for us is that some vendors, not necessarily MS, are doing more frequent, smaller releases and we're really in a culture of challenging upgrades now. It used to be the case that our fees allowed us to upgrade to whatever was next, and it was infrequent enough that moving to new hardware at the same time made sense. But now we get requests to take on upgrades with outages, regression testing and fees where the "feature" being sought is pretty minor. This is true for a range of software types and it makes life really hard for the staff we have on hand. I understand the vendor perspective of something New! to sell every year. Once a market goes that way it's hard to be pushing three year old code. But man, I don't need what a lot of these guys are selling. We only have so many hours to go around, and we have to choose based on our needs rather than their schedules.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Markus — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 08:01:41 GMT

Our two store critical systems have been on SQL2000 because the cost justification just was not there. Our one system that is in rollout of a new application release and the back end dbs are now on SQL2008R2 the vendor supported all three versions of SQL Server for that very reason. The upgrade to our application was put off twice due to the sheer cost of getting all new hardware for the application servers and db server and Windows, SQL Server license. It is a huge cost not to mention the tons of hours of application folks and DBA staff. It has been a 6 month process already getting to this point. At this point there is NO way I could go to the VP and say I want to spend XX dollars to upgrade from 2008R2 to 2012. The benefit just isn't there. Granted, our SQL2000 environments were being pushed to their limits being 32 bit but now with a ton of memory and 64 bit I just cannot see how we can justify the upgrade until the hardware is fully depreciated. The key kicking us to upgrade dbs from SQL2000 is that Microsoft extended support ends in less than 12 months now.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

dma-669038 — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:48:49 GMT

All the reasons you have stated are true, and the most important one among them is that businesses use technology, same way as one uses plumbing or electrical appliances or anything at home. Why would you replace them if they are working? I see so much tweeting and such from high end consultants on deploying 2012, maybe true of some niche businesses who can throw money at it, or technology companies. The real world is not anywhere close and will need a few years to catch up. This 2 year relase schedule Ms has itself is getting very difficult to keep up with. I think software as complex as databasaes should have one release every 5 years not before, if they want to see more adoption.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Mad Hacker — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:35:00 GMT

We couldn't upgrade to 2012 even if we wanted to. A good portion of our data warehousing services are contracted out to a 3rd party vendor and they've not yet tested and certified their product for 2012. We really don't have much to gain by migrating to 2012 anyway unless the vendor makes some appropriate modifications to their product, which is doubtful for the near future. We are a public school system with limited funding and although we get SQL Server at heavily discounted rates, we just can't justify migrating to 2012 when our licensing fees would increase multifold and we would realize what amounts to no real advantages to offest the increase.Although I've got [b]no[/b] hard evidence to back me up, I would be willing to bet that Microsoft's change in the licensing model will result in slower than usual migrations to SQL Server 2008.Oops! I just realized that the line above should have read "no hard evidence". I've made the necessary modification. Please forgive.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

jnmarlin — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 07:00:50 GMT

This is a business, in the business to be profitable. There is no justifiable business reason for us to spend the incredible amount of time and money it would cost to upgrade when the current version works just fine. Microsoft makes so many changes to licensing models that determining which edition you need to go to to keep the features you have is mind boggling. Can't simply go from 2005 Standard to 2012 Standard and assume that they didn't bump some of your required features up to the much more expensive editions (which they have, of course). That bad habit alone will keep us in 2005 for a long, long time.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

chrisn-585491 — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:52:14 GMT

If I want to use a recent version of SQL Server in production, I'll have to change companies. I have more up-to-date hardware and software than my employer does...:w00t:

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Megistal — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 05:59:56 GMT

Our client base (for our software solution) mainly uses XP so upgrading is not even "thinkable". We're a particular niche and we must conform to this situation.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Markus — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 05:59:55 GMT

We are in the middle of our largest SQL Server in our stores upgrade right now. The DB is moving from a Win2003 Active/Passive cluster running on SQL2000. The new environment is all Win2008R2 and the db is an active/passive Win2008R2 cluster running SQL2008R2. It will be rolled out to all of our stores by July. Our other large SQL2000 Cluster has 25 dbs and two of them have been moved to another Win2008/SQL2008R2 Cluster with the others in the beginning stages of dev/test.Other than that we have a handful of other smaller dbs in SQL2000 yet to convert. I expect 90% of those will be converted by June of next year.We have about 250 SQL Server dbs here.Based on the fact that our critical store apps dbs will be just fresh moved to SQL2008R2 this year I just don't see SQL2012 being a we need to upgrade to it in the next few years at all. I am sure we will have a few apps that we will upgrade in the coming few years that will require SQL2012. However, I just don't see us upgrading just because the new version is out.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

LightVader — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 05:44:15 GMT

We have one database that we'll be migrating from 2005 to 2012 this year and another that we'll be migrating to 2008R2. Aside from those two, the rest of our databases are 2005. We'll be slowly migrating them, but I'm not sure if they'll go to 2008 or 2012.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Ian Elliott — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 05:29:03 GMT

[quote]When I ask vendors why, they generally tell me that they don’t have the in-house resources to do the testing. In other words, they are cheap and don’t want to spend the money. [/quote]While I completely agree that this is true in many cases playing devil's advocate I know that there are some smaller houses who really don't have the time, money or resources to keep up with the latest new sql releases all the time.Take someone who's just purchased sql server 08 last year and spent a year developing their new software product and need to get it to market and get sales for the next year or 2 to recoup their investment and pay the bills let alone have any extra for product upgrade, not to mention support costs of the existing product.Situations like this come down to their prices and sales volumes and business feasibility and unfortunately there are some software vendors who struggle day to day to make more than a small margin and just manage to stay in the black.So I'm not sure if "generally" is the right word but then again maybe I know more smaller vendors than larger ones so my perspective is more skewed in that regards. :-D

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Boreades — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 03:33:36 GMT

I'm surprised that one other type of response has not been mentioned yet, so let me be the first. :w00t:We have no budget for any expenditure on non-critical software upgrades.:angry:

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Barry G Freeman — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:49:52 GMT

I think for a lot of DBAs it's a comfort thing as well.I know I have all my tools set up the way I like them, all my alerts fire properly when they're supposed to and my monitoring stuff gives me a good picture of what's happening, and what happened a while ago.When problems with the apps happen, I know exactly where too look to hit the problem quickly.I *still* get confused by the 2008 activity monitor change :) when I have to use the 2008 SSMS and yes, it's going to be a huge investment in time and resources to upgrade to 2008 and then 2012 and still provide the day-to-day support of the existing infrastructure.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

paul s-306273 — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 01:49:07 GMT

Of course, the first version of Oracle was 'Oracle V2' because they knoew people would be vary of 'V1'!

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

P Jones — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:54:41 GMT

We're in exactly the same situation as Bob Barrows, even down to the one app that's keeping a SQL2000 server going!We have the added delay that any new software has to be tested and approved for use by the civil service before we can consider it and that can take a long time.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Evil Kraig F — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:23:40 GMT

[quote][b]Bob Barrows (4/29/2012)[/b][hr]Hah! We're still trying to find time and resources to migrate our existing SQL 2005 apps to SQL 2008, which we recently purchased to my amazement...There's still one application running on SQL2000 due to a 3rd-party app that nobody wants to replace.[/quote]+1.My guess is I'll actually work on 2012 in production around 2020.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Bob Barrows — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 13:00:31 GMT

Hah! We're still trying to find time and resources to migrate our existing SQL 2005 apps to SQL 2008, which we recently purchased to my amazement...There's still one application running on SQL2000 due to a 3rd-party app that nobody wants to replace.Even when we completely migrate, I will need to keep SSIS 2005 running somewhere due to the lack of 64-bit ODBC drivers for Domino.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

TDS DBA — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 08:35:59 GMT

We just completed upgrading from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2008 R2 last year. (The process included upgrading 2 databases that were in 6.5 compatibility mode - which was no longer supported under SQL Server 2008 R2.) I never want to upgrade more than 1 version level again. Having to figure out all of the changes that each version required was problematic. We waited to upgrade as long as we did for all of the reasons that were listed in the original post for this discussion. We [i]had[/i] to upgrade because we wanted more options for hosting our data.We plan on waiting for the full release of Visual Studio 2012 before trying to move to SQL Server 2012. When we were doing the upgrade to 2008 R2, we examined the BOL for Denali to identify and fix any issues that we'd hit when we upgraded to 2012 - so I'm hoping the process will go as smoothly as possible.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Geoff-577403 — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 05:40:35 GMT

When there are 30 hours in the day we will upgrade our infrastructure to 2012. We have 15 heavily used servers on 2008 R2 - anyone want to help me push the orbit of the Earth out by a few hundred KM's? Yeah, lots of servers in DEV, put PROD will take a while ... been teaching all about new features for the last 6 months or so, no time to do real work on it though - doh!

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Jayanth_Kurup — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 01:05:25 GMT

Waiting for the first service pack :D

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Peter Schott — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 21:32:04 GMT

Our plan is to wait until we have the hardware (planned move to new datacenter later this year). Right now we just don't have the machines to do the upgrade from 2005 in a manner where we'd feel comfortable and able to roll back if something happened. Add to that the fact that we haven't even tested on 2008 yet and we've got a fun time ahead of us. Still, at least there's a plan to start the upgrade process. Getting our Dev/QA servers upgraded will help us start testing and find any bits that break. It will be great to finally use some of the features that have been added since 2005.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

Bodhi Densmore — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 21:19:04 GMT

I upgraded a test server using the RTC version. Very few code changes were required. SQL 7 to SQL 2000 was difficult and SQL 2000 to SQL 2005 was difficult. SQL 2005 to SQL 2008 was easy and SQL 2008 to SQL 2012 was even easier.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

gmelhaff — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 15:36:07 GMT

We are upgrading a data warehouse to 2012 at this very moment because...we are almost in production (june) and I'd rather bite the smaller impact of regression testing now prior to production than the much larger impact afterwards, we are already running beta 2012 MDM due to the limitations of the 2008R2 MDM, and I expect we will make use of many of the latest features such as DQS and significant SSIS improvements.

RE: When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

rraja — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 14:22:26 GMT

We have just upgraded one of our dev server.. still exploring the 2012.. Nice article thanks.

When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

bradmcgehee@hotmail.com — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 11:25:41 GMT

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