It would be a daunting task indeed to try to test
every stored procedure and function, every table and view, every online
analytical processing (OLAP) cube, every Data Transformation Services
(DTS) or SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) package, and so on that
your team has built to make sure they still work after you migrate them
to SQL Server 2008.
With the availability of the SQL
Server Upgrade Advisor (UA), you can relax a bit and let the combined
experience and testing of early adopters and the SQL Server development
team go to work for you.
Note
Even though the UA is a great
tool, if you have the resources to do so, it is a good idea to set up an
additional test environment just for SQL Server 2008. Also, you should
thoroughly test your upgraded objects and code after the upgrade on a dry run, just to be sure you don’t miss anything. Remember to make full backups!
The
UA advises on which aspects of your current setup should or need to be
changed to become compatible with SQL Server 2008. Let’s look at how it
works.
Getting Started with the UA
Before running the Upgrade
Advisor, you must first install it. The easiest way to install the
Upgrade Advisor is to start the SQL Server 2008 Installer. On the
Installer Landing page is an option to install the Upgrade Advisor (see Figure 1). Alternatively, the Upgrade Advisor is available in the Servers\redist\Upgrade Advisor
folder of the SQL Server installation media, or from the Microsoft
Download Center. The Upgrade Advisor has the following system
requirements:
Windows XP Service
Pack 2 (SP2) or later, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 SP2 or later,
or Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Windows
Installer beginning with version 4.5 (required by the .NET Framework;
you can install Windows Installer from the Windows Installer website)
The .NET Framework
Note
If not installed already, the .NET
Framework 2.0 is available on the SQL Server 2008 product media, and
from the SDK, redistributable, and service pack download website. To
install the .NET Framework 2.0 from the SQL Server 2008 media, locate
the root of the disk drive. Then double-click the \redist folder, double-click the \2.0 folder, and run Dotnetfx.exe (for 32-bit) or Dotnetfx64.exe (for 64-bit), depending on your operating system.
If
you run the SQL Server Installer, it installs the Windows Installer and
.NET Framework requirements automatically if they are not detected.
If upgrading from SQL Server
2000 Analysis Services, you need to install the SQL Server 2000 Decision
Support Objects (DSOs) on the system where UA will be run to scan
upgrade issues in Analysis Services. To install DSOs, run the SQL Server
2000 Setup program and click Install SQL Server 2000 Components. Click
Analysis Services to start the Analysis Services Setup program. In
Select Components, make sure that the Decision Support Objects component
is selected.
Additionally, if you are
upgrading SQL Server 2000 DTS packages, the SQL Server 2000 client
components are required to scan SQL Server 2000 DTS packages. The SQL
Server 2000 client components can be installed from the SQL Server 2000
installation disk.
If you are upgrading from SQL
Server 2005 DTS packages that were migrated from SQL Server 2000, you
need to install the SQL Server 2005 backward-compatibility components to
scan SQL Server 2005 DTS. Use the SQL Server 2005 installation disk to
install backward-compatibility components.
Note
The location where you can
install SQL Server Upgrade Advisor depends on what you will be
analyzing. Upgrade Advisor supports remote analysis of all supported
components except Reporting Services. If you are not scanning instances
of Reporting Services, you can install Upgrade Advisor on any computer
that can connect to your instance of SQL Server and that meets the
Upgrade Advisor prerequisites. If you are scanning instances of
Reporting Services, you must install Upgrade Advisor on the Report
Server.
As described in the
following sections, the UA has two main functional areas: the Analysis
Wizard and Report Viewer. The first time you use Upgrade Advisor, run
the Upgrade Advisor Analysis Wizard to analyze SQL Server components.
When the wizard finishes the analysis, you can view the resulting
reports in the Upgrade Advisor Report Viewer.
The Analysis Wizard
You’ll be glad to know
that the analysis process does not modify any code or data; that is left
for you to do (or not do) at a later time. As an example, let’s run the
UA’s Analysis Wizard against all the SQL Server components of a locally
installed SQL Server 2005 instance. The Analysis Wizard examines
objects that can be accessed, such as scripts, stored procedures,
triggers, and trace files. Upgrade Advisor cannot analyze desktop
applications or encrypted stored procedures.
To start the process, click the Launch Upgrade Advisor Analysis Wizard hyperlink at the bottom of the Welcome page (see Figure 2).
When the Analysis Wizard’s Welcome page appears, click Next. When you
reach the SQL Server Components screen, choose all the components to be
analyzed by checking their corresponding check boxes (see Figure 3).
Note
Be sure to select only
components that are actually installed on the server being upgraded;
otherwise, the Upgrade Advisor stalls at the appropriate feature screen
with an error message that the feature could not be found on the
specified server.
When the Connection
Parameters screen appears, choose the target server, select an
authentication method, and if using SQL Server authentication, enter
your username and password so that the UA can connect to your instance.
Click Next, and the SQL Server Parameters screen, shown in Figure 4, appears. Choose which (if any) databases to analyze.
You can also use this screen to ask the UA to analyze one or more SQL Profiler trace (.trc)
files. This feature is useful for analyzing the T-SQL statements
submitted from one or more applications for deprecated or discontinued
features. You would want to set up and run a trace in SQL Profiler ahead
of time to capture a representative sample of the T-SQL executed
against the server. You can also scan T-SQL batch files (maintenance
scripts, procedures, functions, triggers, and so on) to check for
deprecated or discontinued features used in the SQL scripts.
For this example, create a
SQL batch file that contains the following T-SQL commands, most of
which are deprecated in SQL Server 2008, just to test the UA:
use bigpubs2008
go
EXEC sp_configure 'set working set size'
SELECT * FROM master..syslockinfo
DECLARE @ptr varbinary(16)
SELECT @ptr = TEXTPTR(pr_info)
FROM pub_info
WHERE pub_id = '6380'
SELECT *
FROM Stores s, Stores s2
WHERE s.Stor_Id *= s2.Stor_Id
AND s.Stor_name <> s2.Stor_name
READTEXT pub_info.pr_info @ptr 0 25
When
you’re ready, click Next, and the Upgrade Advisor presents screens for
each of the SQL Server components you selected previously (refer to Figure 9.3)
asking for login information or to select packages to analyze. Note
that if you selected a component, but that component isn’t installed on
the server you are upgrading, the Upgrade Advisor reports that no
instances of that component could be found on the server and you cannot
proceed until you go back and deselect the component.
If you selected to analyze DTS or SSIS packages, the DTS and SSIS Parameters screens (shown in Figure 5)
give you the option to analyze all the packages stored in the target
instance or to specify one or more package files to be analyzed.
Note
that the DTS Parameters screen advises that you must install the Legacy
Components feature when installing SQL Server 2008; otherwise, SQL
Server 2008 will not be able to run your DTS packages (unless they are
upgraded to the new SSIS format).
When you’re all set with your
DTS and SSIS selections, click Next to reach the Confirm Upgrade Advisor
Settings screen. Make sure that all the SQL Server services you are
analyzing are running and (if you’re happy with your selections) click
the Run button to begin the analysis.
As you can see from the Upgrade Advisor Progress screen that appears (see Figure 6),
the wizard performs a task-based study of each component, providing
per-step reporting, similar to the installer and the System
Configuration Checker.
When the analysis is
complete, the UA Progress screen presents a Launch Report button. The
output of the UA Analysis Wizard is an XML report that you can view via
the second major component of the UA, the Report Viewer, described in
the next section.
Note
You can view your
last-generated report by using the Report Viewer; you can find the link
to launch it on the main screen. If you run the UA more than once
against the same SQL Server instance, however, you must save your
previously generated reports to a directory other than the default
output directory; otherwise, the previously generated report will be
overwritten.
UA reports are saved by default to the folder My Documents\SQL Server 2008 R2 Upgrade Advisor Reports\Servername, and then they are broken down into separate XML files by component (for example, AS.xml for Analysis Services, DE.xml for the Database Engine).
You can launch the Report
Viewer to figure out what to do about the issues the UA may have
uncovered. Click the Launch Report button to proceed.
The Report Viewer
The Report Viewer is
one of the most important tools in the upgrade process because it
provides per-issue messaging, resolution tracking, and (in many cases)
hyperlinks to the compiled help documentation distributed with the UA.
Issues are organized in the
Report Viewer on a per-server and then per-component basis. They can be
filtered by type (that is, all issues, all upgrade issues, pre-upgrade
issues, all migration issues, and resolved issues), and you can track
your resolution progress by checking the This Issue Has Been Resolved
check boxes. Figure 7 shows the main user interface of the Report Viewer.
