Upgrading From Sql Server 2005 to Sql Server 2008

Question

Our company wants to upgrade from Sql Server 2005 to Sql Server 2008 and I wanna ask about:

• What are the steps I should follow to upgrade from 2005 to 2008 ?
• At what point should I take care of it while upgrading ?

Answer 1

You might want to study Upgrading to SQL Server 2008 on MSDN to answer all your questions about it.

There are hardly any breaking changes in 2008 from 2005 though. Unless your 2005 database are using features that were previously deprecated, you shouldn't have much to worry about.

Answer 2

As an addition, you should read the SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide.

Appendix 2 contains an Upgrade Planning Deployment and Tasks Checklist you might need.

And good luck (you'll need that too) :-)

Answer 3

In our experiences, most of the pains come from SSRS. Everything else we had worked perfectly but we did have to tweak some of our reports. If you don't use SSRS, I'd say you're much safer. If you use SSRS, then make a test run to see if you have any issues with your reports.