Database Upgrade to SQL Server 2008 Tools and Approaches

SQL Server Technical Article

Writer: Dmitry Artemov

Contributor: Alexei Khalyako

Technical Reviewer: Alexei Khalyako, Kevin Cox, Mark Souza, Murshed Zaman, Peter Scharlock

Editor: Beth Inghram

Published: May 2010

Applies to: SQL Server 2008 R2

Summary: Performing an upgrade is a complex and often risky project. A successful upgrade can provide an organization with a modern platform for development and production. An unsuccessful upgrade can cause lost time and money, and it can create a bad perception for the future.

This paper documents approaches and tools that can help DBAs and developers to achieve successful and mostly painless upgrade of SQL Server databases from Microsoft® SQL Server® 2000 or SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 (or SQL Server 2008 R2).

In the methodology this paper discusses, a SQL Server workload is captured on customer production environment, and then this identical test workload is run on the old and new versions of SQL Server in a test environment to compare performance and isolate any problem queries. For this approach, we use components from the "RML Utilities for SQL Server" set of tools.

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