We're about to take the plunge and upgrade our servers from SQL 2005 to SQL 2008 R2. Real world accounts of people upgrading to R2 are a bit hard to find so I thought it might be useful to blog what happens. (I don't count marketing 'case studies' that just say stuff like "The process was effortless and the upgrade will pay for itself by the end the week.")

We're using the database engine, Analysis Services and Reporting Services so upgrading by a major version number was looking a bit daunting. I wasn't expecting much trouble on the engine side of things but, as most of the action in 2008 and R2 appears to have been on the Reporting and BI front, I expected to have quite a bit of work to do. But our testing so far has been one nice surprise after another:

• The 2005 backups restore cleanly onto R2.
• R2's BI Studio upgraded the Reporting and Analysis Services solutions without any issues.
• The cubes all deployed and processed just fine.
• R2 BI Studio interacts fine with TFS 2008 version control.

I'll blog some more as things develop.