Last year, Microsoft ended its support for SQL 2008/R2. Customers with an enterprise agreement are still supported, but it’s a good idea to start planning your upgrade. Upgrading your production SQL Servers without a detailed plan of attack can be risky and result in a messy, time-consuming weekend (or two).
The very first step is to decide which version to upgrade to. To help you with this decision, I’ve highlighted benefits of SQL Server 2012 and 2014 so that you can make the best choice for your organization.
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Benefits of SQL Server 2012
Our beloved SQL Server 2008 was a very successful release. It gave us failover clustering, database mirroring, log shipping, and peer-to-peer replication, and more.
Building on its predecessor’s success, SQL Server 2012’s most prized feature, AlwaysOn, gives you an even higher level of confidence in your data redundancy as it enables you to have up to four read-only copies of the primary databases.
Other new and noteworthy features of 2012 also help you organize data, provide speedy business intelligence, and improve query performance:
• File Table –addresses the challenge of managing structured and unstructured data across your organization’s disparate systems, while keeping them in sync.
• Power View – allows you to extract live data into PowerPoint presentations, ensuring accurate, up-to-date information, and enabling you to make quick business decisions.
• Columnstore – transforms the way that rows have been traditionally stored, which fundamentally changes the performance of a query. Rather than row by row, data is stored one column at a time that can carry million column values in one large structure.
Benefits of SQL Server 2014
In the previous two releases of SQL Server, in-memory capabilities were built to increase the speed and processing of analytics: PowerPivot in SQL Server 2008 and in-memory columnstore in SQL Server 2012. SQL Server 2014 has a new feature known as In-Memory Optimized Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) which is designed to process mil¬lions of transactions concurrently at low latency – especially helpful for financial organiations and the gaming industry (such as online gambling).
Other powerful features include Microsoft’s commitment to the hybrid cloud:
• Management Studio – provides a deployment wizard that lets you easily migrate your existing on-premises databases to an Azure virtual machine.
• Managed Backup – works with Windows Azure to save on storage, which automates and maintains database backups based on retention period.
• Storing SQL Server Data Files – files such as .mdf, .ldf and .ndf can now be hosted within Windows Azure Storage container. You are able to store log and data files for both on-premises databases and databases hosted on a Windows Azure VM.
Last but not least: columnstore! Previously, tables that had columnstore indexes could not be updated – as a result you would drop the index, perform the update then rebuild the index. Now in-memory columnstore supports updatable operations such as inserts, updates and deletes – which will greatly simplify an admin’s life.
Varonis Customers who are on unsupported SQL 2008/R2
If you are a current customer with Varonis databases hosted on SQL 2008, there’s another option. Below is a flow chart that might help you decide what your next step should be:
Varonis Customers can perform in-place SQL 2012 or 2014 upgrades while Varonis is installed without requiring a migration. (Log onto http://connect.varonis.com to access our “Upgrading SQL Server 2008 to 2012 for the IDU Suite.pdf” doc). By the way, upgrading to 2014 is similar to 2012.
If you want to go the other route, you can hire our Professional Services team to migrate databases to a new SQL instance. SQL migrations will depend on the environment’s complexity, number of filers, event etc. To contact our team, click here.
