As part of a disaster recovery test of our TFS 2008 instance I hoped to restore our backups of the database (currently on SQL Server 2005) to SQL Server 2008.
I noticed a warning on MSDN that this could make a restore impossible.
Has this been done in the wild? What are the risks?
I have performed one upgrade of TFS 2008, and we tried to restore backups to a SQL Server 2008 instance. We were also upgrading from the final beta of TFS 2008, so I can't say whether the issues we encountered were due to it being from a beta, or if it was due to the change in SQL Server versions. It turned into a minor disaster, and we ended up reinstalling TFS fresh and copied our source code into it (which luckily was fully checked out on several developer machines). We lost our source control history for a short time, but we were eventually able to get the original instance up and running again, which we kept around for legacy source control history reference.
Your disaster recovery plan should never include an upgrade at the same time. It's prudent to make the upgrade first and then plan your disaster recovery plan. Waiting for a recovery opportunity could spell trouble.
That being said, as long as you're using the latest service packs, TFS 2008 is fully supported on SQL Server 2008 now.
Buck Hodges is a definitive TFS guru. Here's what he says:
SQL 2008 SP1 has just been released, and we've gotten a couple of questions about whether it is supported with with Team Foundation Server 2008. We tested SQL 2008 SP1 with both the original release of TFS 2008 and TFS 2008 SP1, and we do fully support using it with either release of TFS 2008.
http://blogs.msdn.com/buckh/archive/2009/04/09/tfs-2008-supports-sql-2008-sp1.aspx