Featured Article(s)
Things Your Mother Never Mentioned About Setting Up an Oracle Database – Steps 6 and 7
This series article looks at setting up the secondary backups of an Oracle database. The secondary backup is an export of the database into a compressed file along with the DDL and DCL needed to recreate the schemas on another instance.
Video Interview on SSWUGtv
(Special Edition SelectViews Show) Check out our latest video, an interview with Microsoft’s Buck Woody. It’s an informal interview, with lots of great information about SQL Server, the world of databases, SQL Server 2008 and such.
[Watch The Show]
Upgrade Feedback on Timeframes
Jeff: "Every other year…or longer.
Our problem is that we’re tied in to man 3rd party software vendors that are not keeping up with the Microsoft development pace. We were an early adopter of SQL Server 2005 but we still have SQL Server 2000 servers because we’ve got software that has only recently approved support for SQL 2005. We had one vendor that approved migration to SQL 2005 but we had to use Compatibility Level 80, which is SQL 2000. I also have to maintain a production server for SQL 2005 SP1 and a separate one for SQL 2005 SP2 because vendors approved for SQL 2005 are not up to SP2 support yet…and how long has that been available? Our vendors have been slow to adapt and we are too tied in to them. It’s frustrating. I can’t imagine we’ll be able to move to SQL 2008 for a LONG time"
Darryl: "Essentially, ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t touch it’"
Jeremy: "Every 6 months to 2 years.
Not a concise answer but it depends on the client and their environment.
For my larger (db size) clients it has been more frequent.
One scenario is as follows: April 08 – Migrate environments to 2005 – dev and qa. Server count = 36. Database count ~~ 160
June 08 – Migrate Production environments to 64 bit 2005 environment on better / larger hardware.
July 08 – Migrate and consolidate 14 dev / qa db servers to 4 dev/qa db servers running identical hardware and in 64 bit mode.
Future plans – Dec / Jan 09 migrate dev/qa to 2008 with plan to migrate prod to 2008 in Feb / March timeframe.
That’s wayyyyy too much time spent in analysis and re-writes of code that contains deprecated features… the largest effort with this so far has been to re-write chunks of 200 + stored procs that used the tsequal function in 2k.
Another scenario is hold off on a sql 2k upgrade (64 bit) until win2k8 is a bit more stable and migrate from win2k3 to win2k8 and sql2k to sql2k8 all in one big swoop."
Featured White Paper(s)
Best Practices for Monitoring Privileged Database Users
Whether its financial information, healthcare data, Personally Identifiable Information (PII), intellectual property or other… (read more)
Improving Data Protection and Storage Reliability for Critical Databases
Discover how a healthcare management company met the challenge of improving data protection and storage reliability for criti… (read more)