Destination: SQL Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008 R2 (part 2) - Upgrading In-Place

Upgrading In-Place

Now that you’ve seen how to migrate your databases to SQL Server 2008 by following the side-by-side migration path, let’s look at the alternative: upgrading in-place. Unlike a side-by-side install, an in-place upgrade permanently modifies the SQL Server components, data, and metadata objects, and there is no going back. You will likely be more comfortable taking the side-by-side migration path than doing an in-place upgrade, unless a side-by-side migration is not possible because of disk space limitations, you have very few SQL Server features in use, or you are fairly confident about the potential success of the upgrade process because you’ve done extensive issue resolution with the assistance of the Upgrade Assistant.

If you are performing an in-place upgrade of the Database Engine, it is strongly recommended that you first do the following:

• Create full, verified backups of your existing SQL Server databases.
  
  
• Run the appropriate DBCC consistency checks (for example, DBCC CHECKDB and DBCC CHECKFILEGROUP).
  
  
• Make sure the system databases on your pre-2008 instances (for example, master, msdb, tempdb, and model) are all set to auto-grow.
  
  
• Disable any startup stored procedures that get kicked off when the SQL Server service starts.
  
  
• Disable database replication and empty the replication log.
  
  

After you perform all these actions, you are ready to begin the upgrade process.

Upgrading the Database Engine

You perform an in-place upgrade by running the SQL Server Installation Center. On the Installation page, you can invoke the Upgrade Wizard to upgrade from SQL Server 2000, 2005, or 2008 (see Figure 6). After first running the Setup Rules check and installing the Setup Support Files, the Upgrade Wizard essentially runs the installation process. The key differences between running a new install versus an upgrade is that during the upgrade process, you choose an existing default or named instance on the Select Instance screen (see Figure 7).

Figure 6. Running the Upgrade Wizard from the Installation Center.

Figure 7. The Select Instance screen in the SQL Server Installation Center.

After selecting the instance to upgrade, you see the Feature Selection page. The features to be upgraded are preselected. You cannot change the features to be upgraded, and you cannot add features during an upgrade operation. To add features, you need to run the Installation Center again after the upgrade operation is complete.

After making choices on the Features Selection page, step through the Instance Configuration, Disk Space Requirements, and Server Configuration screens, making changes as necessary. For example, authentication and login information are carried forward from the previous instance of SQL Server. You can assign the same login account to all SQL Server services, or you can configure each service account individually. You can also specify whether services start automatically, are started manually, or are disabled.

Next, you are presented with options for upgrading your full-text catalogs. In SQL Server 2005 and earlier versions, each full-text index resided in a full-text catalog that belonged to its own filegroup and was treated as a database file. In SQL Server 2008, a full-text catalog is a logical concept that refers to a group of full-text indexes and is no longer treated as a separate database file with a physical path. However, during upgrade of any full-text catalog, a new filegroup is still created on the same disk to maintain the pre-upgrade disk I/O behavior. If the old full-text catalog path is invalid, though, the upgrade places the full-text index in the same filegroup as the base table or in the primary filegroup if the table is partitioned.

Three options are available for upgrading your existing full-text catalogs:

• Import— Typically, import is the fastest method of upgrading, but an imported full-text catalog does not use the new and enhanced word breakers introduced in SQL Server 2008, so you might want to rebuild your full-text catalogs eventually if not during the upgrade.

• Rebuild— This method uses the new SQL Server 2008 word breakers, but rebuilding indexes can take awhile.

• Reset— When you use this method, SQL Server 2005 full-text catalog files are removed, but the metadata for full-text catalogs and full-text indexes is retained. The catalog remains empty until you manually issue a full population after the upgrade completes.

After choosing your full-text upgrade option, you next choose your Error Reporting options, and then the Upgrade Rules check is run to validate your system configuration with the options and features chosen during the upgrade process. If all the rules pass, you can review the upgrade operation on the Ready to Upgrade page, which also displays the path to the upgrade configuration file . If everything looks okay, click Upgrade to begin the upgrade process. The upgrade process automatically upgrades all objects that are common to all databases, including the following:

• Tables, views, indexes, and constraints

• Stored procedures, functions, and triggers

• User-defined types, rules, and defaults

• Logins, users, and permissions

• Database diagrams

You can monitor the upgrade progress on the Upgrade Progress screen. Depending on your hardware configuration and the features to be upgraded, the upgrade operation can take from approximately 30 minutes to several hours. The databases on the instance being upgraded remain unavailable until the upgrade is complete.

When the upgrade finishes, it displays the upgrade status of each component and also provides the location of the upgrade log. A system restart may be required in some cases if any upgraded components were in use during the upgrade process.

When your upgrade of the Database Engine is complete, it is recommended that you perform the following on all databases (also recommended for side-by-side migration):

• Repopulate your full-text catalogs if you chose not to rebuild them during the upgrade.
  
  
• Run the sp_updatestats system stored procedure to update statistics.
  
  
• Reregister your server in SSMS.
  
  

The SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Matrix

No software upgrade section would be complete without an illustrative table showing the versions and editions of SQL Server for which the upgrade methods described thus far are supported. They are presented in Table 1.