When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item When Will You Upgrade to SQL Server 2012?

    Brad M. McGehee
    DBA

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Waiting for the first service pack πŸ˜€

    Jayanth Kurup[/url]

  • 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!

  • 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 had 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.

  • 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.

  • Bob Barrows (4/29/2012)


    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.

    +1.

    My guess is I'll actually work on 2012 in production around 2020.


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  • 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.

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

  • 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 πŸ™‚ 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.

    DBA (Dogsbody with Bad Attitude)

  • 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:

  • 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.

    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. πŸ˜€

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