September 25, 2008 at 3:10 am
Apology first - this is a long post with many questions. My excuse is that I'm in a hurry (being made redundant in a couple of weeks), so leveraging your wisdom must be part of my research.
I'm trying to build a proposal to upgrade my company from SQL 2000, and need to present a cost / benefit case. Costs are reasonably easy to come by, but benefits are harder to quantify. It's a company with a low risk appetite, and one which likes to be sure that ROI on investment is solid. My suggestion will be to go straight to SQL 2008, following the advice on SQL Server Central and elsewhere, if for no better reason than this will keep us current for longer and only need one regression test cycle.
Hence, I would like people's opinions on the benefits I can identify (questions in bold):
1. Staff recruitment and retention will be easier - SQL 2000 people are not hard to find, but most of the market would rather be working on more up to date stuff.
2. Database and back up encryption would be useful (this is a financial organisation) and can be transparent to applications
3. Auditing features look useful
4. Data compression might help performance (i/o has often been a limiting factor for our systems in a short overnight processing window) - but does this actually work well in the real world?
5. Performance studio might be handy - but given that our outsourced DBAs are using Idera tools, would this be any advance?
6. Entity data services might be of use to developers: our object designs are not very complex but we are always looking for closer alignment between code and real world.
7. New data types will be handy but not jaw-dropping
8. Table value parameters could be very useful and allow refactoring of some of our nastiest code (much of which is my fault...)
9. SQL 2000 being in extended support is a risk which needs mitigation
10. Log stream compression could be very useful - we currently log ship for business continuity and DR, and have some capacity issues with this (lines between the two data centres, i/o on the destination server, etc)
11. LINQ is something I can't make up my mind on. There's a challenge in having code in both applications and SQL, and if LINQ would effectively mean all the code is in the app, helping version control and simplifying release, that would be useful. But does it really do this?
12. Analysis Services is something we don't yet use. The BI vendors are calling me daily. Is Analysis Services a good cheap way to get into BI, with the added benefit of the development team building something they really understand rather than buying something and getting consultants implementing it and disappearing?
13. Merge looks handy - we often deal with this kind of issue and it can be slow in big data sets. Are the performance improvements suggested really seen in the real world?
14. Dependency Management: does this compete with or surpass Red Gate's offering?
15. We don't cluster at the moment, but as business continuity requirements tighten up, we may need to. Are the clustering improvements in 2008 a significant step forward?
16. We are fans of virtual servers, but have recently been warned off it for SQL 2005 (alas, a bit late, and our 2005 VMs are working nicely so far). I hear that 2008 was built with virtualisation in mind, so is this a big step forward?
17. Does Report Builder 2.0 really help end-users to create their own reports? Years ago I worked in a business that hoped that Crystal Reports would be an end-user tool, with pretty bad results. Does this really work for the smart user (eg someone who can build significant Excel spreadsheets)?
Many thanks in advance for comments from those with experience.
Bill.
(Soon to be ex development manager)
September 25, 2008 at 10:13 am
Haven't had time to reply to all
but do want to ask, is the upgrade plan to SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, or Standard?
A lot of features you mentioned are only available in Enterprise
Data/Backup compression, Resource Governor, Transparent Data Encryption
Auditing
SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition includes all of the features described in this chapter, which
includes both the SQL Auditing Foundation and Fine Grained Auditing. SQL Server 2008 Standard
Edition only provides the SQL Auditing Foundation.
It's worth visiting the Microsoft PDF for comparison
September 25, 2008 at 10:39 am
Thanks, Jerry.
My assumption is that the editions used will mirror what we have, so 2000 Ent gets upgraded to 2008 Ent, and 2000 Std to 2008 Std. This simplification should be enough for the project proposal, and then the project team (if the project is approved) could get into the detail of what's needed.
One reason for this is that the software costs will be much less than the labour and testing costs, so if we spend a few thousand extra on an Enterprise licence that we turn out not to need, it's not the end of the world - and none of the accountants need ever know 🙂
Bill.
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