Microsoft has just released SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide. This guide is very comprehensive and covers the subject of upgrade in-depth. This is indeed a helpful detailed white paper. Even writing a summary of this white paper would take over 100 pages. This further proves that SQL Server 2012 is quite an important release from Microsoft. This white paper discusses how to upgrade from SQL Server 2008/R2 to SQL Server 2012. I love how it starts with the most interesting and basic discussion of upgrade strategies: 1) In-place upgrades, 2) Side by side upgrade, 3) One-server, and 4) Two-server. This whitepaper is not just pure theory but is also an excellent source for some tips and tricks. Here is an example of a good tip from the paper:

“If you want to upgrade just one database from a legacy instance of SQL Server and not upgrade the other databases on the server, use the side-by-side upgrade method instead of the in-place method.”

There are so many trivia, tips and tricks that make creating the list seems humanly impossible given a short period of time. My friend Vinod Kumar, an SQL Server expert, wrote a very interesting article on SQL Server 2012 Upgrade before. In that article, Vinod addressed the most interesting and practical questions related to upgrades. He started with the fundamentals of how to start backup before upgrade and ended with fail-safe strategies after the upgrade is over. He covered end-to-end concepts in his blog posts in simple words in extremely precise statements.

A successful upgrade uses a cycle of: planning, document process, testing, refine process, testing, planning upgrade window, execution, verifying of upgrade and opening for business. If you are at Vinod’s blog post, I suggest you go all the way down and collect the gold mine of most important links. I have bookmarked the blog by blogging about it and I suggest that you bookmark it as well with the way you prefer.

Vinod Kumar’s blog post on SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide

SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide is a detailed resource that’s also available online for free. Each chapter was carefully crafted and explained in detail. Here is a quick list of the chapters included in the whitepaper. Before downloading the guide, beware of its size of 9 MB and 454 pages.

Here’s the list of chapters:

Chapter 1: Upgrade Planning and Deployment
Chapter 2: Management Tools
Chapter 3: Relational Databases
Chapter 4: High Availability
Chapter 5: Database Security
Chapter 6: Full-Text Search
Chapter 7: Service Broker
Chapter 8: SQL Server Express
Chapter 9: SQL Server Data Tools
Chapter 10: Transact-SQL Queries
Chapter 11: Spatial Data
Chapter 12: XML and XQuery
Chapter 13: CLR
Chapter 14: SQL Server Management Objects
Chapter 15: Business Intelligence Tools
Chapter 16: Analysis Services
Chapter 17: Integration Services
Chapter 18: Reporting Services
Chapter 19: Data Mining
Chapter 20: Other Microsoft Applications and Platforms
Appendix 1: Version and Edition Upgrade Paths
Appendix 2: SQL Server 2012: Upgrade Planning Checklist

Download SQL Server 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide [454 pages and 9 MB]

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