Home Forums Discussions General Discussion SQL upgrade

@Chris,

Good to hear from you again. Hope you are well.

While I do certainly understand your philosophy, I'm afraid I cannot agree with it. If your SQL Server upgrade goes south for whatever reason, then your practice is down until you can get support on the phone and support fixes the issue. That could be a few hours to a couple of days depending on how backed up AC support is. The problem is made even worse by those out there who have bare-metal installs because that almost totally wipes out the choice of just standing up a new server and moving the database over to recover quickly. And even for those that do virtualize, standing up a new server may still not be much of an option because they have EVERYTHING installed on one virtual server (Amazing Charts, SQL Server, domain controller, gateway server, DHCP, DNS, and so on) so standing up a new server is now an all-day affair rather than 2 hours of work.

Upgrading from SQL Server 2012 to 2016 should be a planned weekend thing, should take no more than two hours, and should be done after fresh backups are taken and a snapshot created in whatever hypervisor the sever is using. But that's assuming your servers are CLEAN, meaning they don't have mixed roles and lots of "toys" from your IT person installed on them and are virtualized. That's the biggest problem I've seen from the offices whose IT I have taken over the past 12 months: tons of completely unnecessary garbage installed on one server or one server expected to just do everything. Not good.

JamesNT