The Agenda

An upgrade these days is not always a simple case of backup and restore or upgrading the software in place as it used to be. Rigorous planning is needed to ensure a successful project, ranging from gathering the business requirements, understanding the scope and performing the discovery phase all the way through to the planning testing and migration.

In this session we will discuss how business requirements help drive upgrade approach. We will look at the free tooling that is available for SQL Server environment analysis and enumerate the upgrade paths for different version of SQL Server. Moving through the stages to identify what to look for and how to capture data on a pre-upgrade environment, and interpret the data to scale a new environment. We will address design for SQL Server on-premises and in Microsoft Azure VMs. Finally we will cover validating your upgraded SQL Server environment. We will look at the options for side-by-side and in-place upgrades, and approaches such as mirroring, log shipping, backup and restore, and detaching and attaching the files.