Writer: Dmitry Artemov

Contributor: Alexei Khalyako

Technical Reviewer: Alexei Khalyako, Kevin Cox, Mark Souza, Murshed Zaman, Peter Scharlock

Editor: Beth Inghram

Published: May 2010

Applies to:SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2

Summary: Performing an upgrade is a complex and often risky project. A successful upgrade can provide an organization with a modern platform for development and production. An unsuccessful upgrade can cause lost time and money, and it can create a bad perception for the future.

This paper documents approaches and tools that can help DBAs and developers to achieve successful and mostly painless upgrade of SQL Server databases from Microsoft® SQL Server® 2000 or SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 (or SQL Server 2008 R2).

In the methodology this paper discusses, a SQL Server workload is captured on customer production environment, and then this identical test workload is run on the old and new versions of SQL Server in a test environment to compare performance and isolate any problem queries. For this approach, we use components from the "RML Utilities for SQL Server" set of tools.

For more details, please look in this whitepaper: Database Upgrade to SQL Server 2008 Tools and Approaches