SQL Server Upgrade Recommendations and Best Practices Part 1: Upgrade Overview and Project Planning

Business Justification

ID

Justification

Supporting Information

1

Total Cost of Ownership³

• Total Cost of Ownership (TOC) lower than any other DBMS in the market

2

System Performance³

• Unprecedented System Performance for both OLTP and OLAP environments

• Improved ability to scale up and out by leveraging expanded hardware resources
  
  • As much as 64 GB of Memory and 32 Processors

3

Microsoft Support

• As SQL Server 6.5 ages, Microsoft is providing less support for the product and will eventually have few Support Engineers available to address critical needs

• Currently, if you have a business critical issue with SQL Server 6.5, the typical Microsoft Support recommendation is to ‘Upgrade to SQL Server 2000’

4

Regulated Industry Requirements

• Upgrading to SQL Server 2000 becomes especially important for companies in regulated industries that may require a several year data retention period

• Relying on SQL Server 6.5 for the short term may not be an issue because staff is familiar with the technology

5

DBA Support

• In five years, finding individuals to administer SQL Server 6.5 will be difficult and not attractive to DBAs who are typically interested in the latest and greatest technologies

6

Level of Automation

• The level of automation from the SQL Server tool set

  • Enterprise Manager
  • Query Analyzer
  • Profiler
  • Data Transformation Services (DTS)

7

New Capabilities²

• Analysis Services
• DTS
• XML Integration
• Optimizer Enhancements
• Functions
• DBCC’s
• Log Shipping
• New Replication Models
• Full Text Indexing
• Database Recovery Models
• Linked Servers

8

Third Party Products

• SQL LiteSpeed – Compressed and Encrypted backups – www.sqllitespeed.com
  
  
• Lumigent Entegra – Enterprise Auditing Solution – www.lumigent.com/products/entegra/entegra.htm
  
  
• Lumigent Log Explorer – Review and Rollback Database Transactions – www.lumigent.com/products/le_sql/le_sql.htm
  
  
• Precise Indepth for SQL Server – Performance Tuning – http://www.precise.com/
• NetIQ SQL Management Suite – Enterprise Monitoring and Alerting – www.netiq.com/products/sql/default.asp