I recently come across very interesting white paper written for Microsoft by Solid Quality Mentors. A successful upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2 should be smooth and trouble-free. To do that smooth transition, you must plan sufficiently for the upgrade and match the complexity of your database application. Otherwise, you risk costly and stressful errors and upgrade problems.

SQL Server 2008 R2 Upgrade Technical Reference Guide is one of the best and comprehensive reference guide I have seen on the subject of SQL Server 2008 R2 upgrade. There are so many various subjects discussed about upgrade which one would always wanted to see.

You can find the link of why one has to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2 over here: Why upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2.

White paper to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 R2 Upgrade Guide.

Here is the quick list of content of the white paper.

1. Upgrade Planning and Deployment
2. Management and Development Tools
3. Relational Databases
4. High Availability
5. Database Security
6. Full-Text Search
7. Service Broker
8. Transact-SQL Queries
9. Notification Services
10. SQL Server Express
11. Analysis Services
12. Data Mining
13. Integration Services
14. Reporting Services
15. Other Microsoft Applications and Platforms
Appendix 1: Version and Edition Upgrade Paths
Appendix 2: Upgrade Planning Deployment and Tasks Checklist

This white paper is indeed huge with 490 pages and 151,956 words.As I said, this is one of the most comprehensive white paper ever published on the subject. Just reading this white paper one can learn a lot about SQL Server.

Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com)