What do I need to do to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2 ?

Photo credit: Ewan traveler

An upgrade of your SQL Server from SQL 2005, 2008 to SQL Server 2008 R2 is something you need to prepare and plan. I will give some examples:

• Which upgrade strategy is the best for my situation. An in-place uprade or an Side-by-side upgrade?
• How can I minimize downtime during the upgrade?
• Backward compatibility. Which features are deprecated, discontinued or changed in the new version?
• Considerations for upgrading without a DBA.
• Feature changes in the management and development tools.
• .......

Microsoft has published a 'Why upgrade' site. On this site you can download the SQL Server 2008 R2 upgrade technical reference guide. This technical reference guide contains a lot of useful information which will help you to plan your SQL Server upgrade. The technical reference guide contains 15 chapters with a total of 490 pages.

Table of contents:

1. Upgrade Planning and Deployment
2. Management and Development Tools
3. Relational Databases
4. High Availability
5. Database Security
6. Full-Text Search
7. Service Broker
8. Transact-SQL Queries
9. Notification Services
10. SQL Server Express
11. Analysis Services
12. Data Mining
13. Integration Services
14. Reporting Services
15. Other Microsoft Applications and Platforms

Enjoy the upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2. After it, you can make use of the new features for example:

• Backup compression
• Report Builder 3.0
• Enrich your account data with geography data to show them on a map.

and I will end this blogpost with: My favorite Top 10 Features of SQL 2008 R2.