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10.10.03



By Jeremy Kadlec

As the DBA in your organization, you are central to the success of the SQL Server environment. In the case of a system upgrade, you need to act as a ‘driver’ for an upgrade project to ensure success based on your technical expertise and role in the organization. Over this multi-part series, these articles will outline proven and recommended best practices for the upgrade process. This process is detailed from both technical and logistical perspectives which are both critical to the success of the project.

Needless to say, upgrading to SQL Server 2000 can be a daunting task based on the criticality of the systems, level of coordination and technical planning. As such, the series of articles will provide valuable explanations, charts and graphics to best illustrate the points to assist you in the project. With this being said, be prepared to work with new team members, wear new hats and resolve challenging issues in the course of upgrading to SQL Server 2000.

The motivation for this article is the realization that in many companies applications are in place, but the right tool for the job is not being leveraged. Too often, piece-meal applications are supporting business critical functions that cannot be leveraged to save time nor generate revenue. To further elaborate:
Companies are still running SQL Server 6.5 and limping along by having IT staff spending hours resolving server down, corruption and data integrity problems with minimal user productivity Microsoft Access has grown from a desktop database to a department of users that are severely stressing the database ultimately leading to corruption and frustration 3rd party Applications need to be upgraded in order to leverage new functionality released by the vendor and needed for the business Microsoft Excel is being used to run business critical functions and important data is scattered across the organization and is sometimes mistakenly lost The bottom line contribution by the DBAs for the business is to improve efficiency and accuracy for the user community as well as save time and money for the business. The DBAs win by being able focus on more challenging IT projects on the latest and greatest technology. I am sure you can agree this is a WIN-WIN scenario for everyone involved.

Business Justification - SQL Server 2000 Upgrade
For those companies that have not migrated existing servers to SQL Server 2000, the rewards certainly outweigh the effort. The level of effort may be moderate to high, but the overall platform stability and feature rich capabilities of SQL Server 2000 are unprecedented. As a DBA, your ultimate responsibility is to ensure your systems are available to support the business needs to include the proper platform to efficiently and accurately process the transactions in a cost effective manner. Below outlines the Business Justification to leverage SQL Server 2000.

Business Justification
IDJustificationSupporting Information
1Total Cost of Ownership3
  • Total Cost of Ownership (TOC) lower than any other DBMS in the market
2System 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
3Microsoft 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’
4Regulated 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
5DBA 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
6Level of Automation
  • The level of automation from the SQL Server tool set
    • Enterprise Manager
    • Query Analyzer
    • Profiler
    • Data Transformation Services (DTS)
7New Capabilities2
  • Analysis Services
  • DTS
  • XML Integration
  • Optimizer Enhancements
  • Functions
  • DBCC’s
  • Log Shipping
  • New Replication Models
  • Full Text Indexing
  • Database Recovery Models
  • Linked Servers
8Third Party Products


Building the Upgrade Project Plan
An Upgrade project that is critical to the business requires project planning in order to efficiently and accurately complete the project. Due to the sheer size of the project and the number of individuals involved, completing the project properly becomes more of a challenge. Although this can be challenging, as the DBA you are the cornerstone of the SQL Server environment. You can take on this project to benefit the company and showcase your skills to demonstrate that you can take on more responsibility. In order to break down the SQL Server Upgrade project, a DBA must:

* Identify the major project phases1

Originally Published 02.25.2003 – Jeremy Kadlec – Edgewood Solutions. All rights reserved 2003

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About the Author:
 Jeremy Kadlec serves as the Principal Database Engineer at Edgewood Solutions. He has been building technical solutions for the last five years primarily focused on SQL Server 6.5, 7.0 and 2000. Mr. Kadlec has set and implemented a number of SQL Server standards to include Upgrades to SQL Server 2000, EMC Migrations, Unattended Installations, Hardware/Software Configurations, Disaster Recovery, Database Security, Server Maintenance and System Performance Tuning. Mr. Kadlec has been able to implement these solutions as a Project Manager and Lead DBA by standardizing a project management methodology which can be used across projects and passed on to new team members.


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