• I manage the Business Intelligence server for my company and we just started planning our upgrade to 2014. I expect that all our BI servers except the SharePoint/SSRS stuff will be upgraded by the end of August.

    Again, we're very early in the planning stages but the rough outline goes something like this:

    1. Developers upgrade to Visual Studio 2013 and SSDT-BI

    2. Upgrade the SSIS servers

    3. Upgrade the SSAS servers

    4. Upgrade the Data Engine servers

    We did an in-place upgrade of 2008 R2 to 2012 when it came out and didn't have a bit of trouble. This time we're doing side-by-side and will switch out Production servers over the weekend.

    To be honest, we probably wouldn't be upgrading so quickly if it weren't for the In Memory Columnstore indexes. Nothing has really changed in any of the major SQL Server features except for the data engine but we have seen some fantastic results with the columnstores. We didn't get much traction with them in 2012 because of the extra work that needed to be done with the SSIS packages to add the DROP/CREATE steps wherever we needed them. Now it's a no-brainer.

    [font="Tahoma"]Bryant E. Byrd, BSSE MCDBA MCAD[/font]
    Business Intelligence Administrator
    MSBI Administration Blog