Testing for SQL Server 2008 Upgrades

If you want to upgrade, I suggest you start planning. Get together a full project plan that contains everything from planning and testing to execution and remediation. I cannot stress how important I think planning is but I am just going to talk about testing right now.

Testing with a tool from Scalability Experts. It is designed to help you test functionality. It is called the “SQL Server 2008 Upgrade Assistant”. It goes above and beyond the Upgrade Advisor. Its purpose is to take your code(sql) that currently exists on SQL Server 2000 or SQL Server 2005 and verifies it runs on SQL Server 2008. It is really nice. A coworker and I took an application through the Microsoft Labs to test with it on CTP5 a few months ago. I think they are still having these labs. Hit up your local MSFT evangelist about it.

Here is what it does behind the scenes:

1. Takes a full backup of all production databases.
2. Starts a trace with the replay template.
3. Later, it restores your databases in the test environment on SQL Server 2000\2005.
4. Replays the trace and captures the output and errors.
5. You upgrade the test environment.
6. Restore databases again.
7. Replay the trace again.
8. Compare the output from steps 4 and 7.

Once you are done, you should have a really good idea if you are going to have any compatibility issues. It is not the end of the road for testing. It doesn’t measure performance or test connectivity(like from legacy VB6 COM objects) so add line items for that to the plan but it will definitely help ease the process.

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Comments from the following blog entry: http://www.urlrecorder.com/vb6

posted @ Wednesday, May 20, 2009 9:31 AM

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