Solo Technology

I’ve spent a lot of time during the past couple weeks planning for some SQL Server 2005 upgrades. I’ve set up virtual servers, I’ve mirrored my dev and prod environments. Gone through the upgrades repeatedly. Taken notes on the processes and recruited regression testers. Everything was (if I dare say so) very meticulously planned.

Today was the big day. Starting the journey by upgrading the main development server — to be followed by an upgrade of our primary production servers this weekend if all went well. After some scheduling mishaps and the usual communications problems, it was determined I’d start at 5pm.

By 5:15 I’d finished my first run at it only to realize that the database instance hadn’t been upgraded. Hmm. Tried again and paid a little bit more attention to what was going on. Turns out that current SQL 2k install is not upgradeable. Whatever that might mean… probably related to the fact that the 2005 install is from MSDN. I’m now wondering if that’s where the 2000 install came from too? Have to check that first thing in the AM.

Well, the issue here is that in all my test scenarios it was upgradeable. Now I have to start over and test a full uninstall of the old version, re-install of the new version and then re-attaching the databases. In itself, that doesn’t seem like a big deal. But, I have this big ol’ pile of DTS (data transformation) packages that herds our nightly QA to Prod database sync. Uninstalling will lose those.

Oh, and DTS is deprecated in SQL Server 2005. Have to test to make sure I can still import these in some fashion after installing the SQL Server 2000 Design components in the new install.

Again, it’ll probably be a pretty simple test scenario tomorrow morning, but right now I’m just tragically bummed. I hate failing on something that I spent so much time planning. Not to mention such a public failure too.

[Cool goat picture from wYnand!]

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