We're hoping to upgrade shortly to v14, and we have a very, very large corpus of custom objects in our database, so my primary concern with the upgrade is if anything in our customizations is going to not be compatible with SQL Server 2014.
I know this happened during the last SQL Server upgrade for us: a large number of reports, agent jobs and the like caused all sorts of curious havoc, and it came down to 2008 not allowing implicit truncation of strings.
We are on a brutally tight upgrade schedule, so I was hoping to hear from any early adopters if they'd run across any big differences between SQL versions such as that example.
Thanks,
Gawain
Chris Jensen, I was wondering what your take is on doing a side-by-side vs new VM install of SQL 2016. We've been thinking of installing SQL 16 on the same VM that has our Test and Staging SQL 2008 instances but don't want to break everything. How big of a project would it be to migrate everything to a fresh server? Any IP/port/other considerations we should know about? Thanks!
Caitlin Boake said:How big of a project would it be to migrate everything to a fresh server?
I tend to like the idea of starting fresh on a new VM, and while scripting/exporting/importing everything possible (e.g. SA jobs, Windows scheduled tasks, etc.) is helpful, there are lots of little things to remember, e.g. permissions on shares, paths in ini & config files, paths to images in reports, etc..
On balance, I've found in-place SQL Server upgrades to be less trouble, though I'm sure we'll move to new VMs again, probably no later than whenever we move to a newer major version of the underlying OS.
Caitlin Boake said:Any IP/port/other considerations we should know about?
None that I can remember. DNS is your friend. :-)