executive summary

Best Practices for

Migrating to SQL Server 2014

Microsoft SQL Server 2014 offers many new features that make it a compelling
upgrade.
Compatibility and hardware requirements should be understood before
committing to upgrade.
Two upgrade pathsin-place upgrade and data migration installare
available for SQL Server.
New features, such as AlwaysOn, must be supported with application changes
or by third-party software to apply.
ScaleArc offers businesses a faster time-to-value for SQL Server upgrades
with automatic support for many 2014 features.

November 18, 2014

Michael Otey, Senior Technical Director, Windows IT Pro & SQL Server Pro
Varun Singh, Founder & CTO, ScaleArc

in partnership with

executive
s u m m a ry

Best Practices
for Migrating to SQL Server 2014
Overview
Upgrading a business-critical back-end solution like SQL Server requires careful planning,
and it is not just about the project plan.
Businesses need to weigh the benefits of the
upgrade against the time and risks as well as
any costs involved in procuring new hardware.
While new features often provide compelling
reasons to upgradefor example, AlwaysOn
and the in-memory OLTP engine can be
compelling for SQL Server 2014 upgrades
they can also require additional consideration
and support configurations.
ScaleArcs database load-balancing solution
can help organizations realize value from
these upgrades faster than if they had to
make application or other changes to complete the upgrade. The solution mitigates
some of the inefficiencies in SQL Server 2014,
offering automated support for read/write
splits, geo-aware load balancing, replication
lag monitoring, and auto-failover within or
between data centers that is transparent to
the app.

Context
Michael Otey introduced the key benefits of
upgrading to SQL Server 2014 and discussed
upgrade paths and considerations. Varun
Singh provided insight on how ScaleArc can
help businesses achieve faster value from the
upgrade.

Key Takeaways
Microsoft SQL Server 2014 offers
many new features that make it a
compelling upgrade.
New features in Microsoft SQL Server 2014
are likely to compel businesses to upgrade.
These features include:

Increased resource limits. This RAM

increase is particularly evident in the

Standard Edition, where support doubled
from 64 GB to 128 GB.

In-memory OLTP engine. Certain tables

and stored procedures can be moved into

RAM to improve performance.

AlwaysOn. Introduced with SQL Server

2012, this high-availability and disasterrecovery solution improves upon what

database mirroring and failover clustering
offer.

Azure integration. Support for Microsofts

cloud offering is available with this release.

Updateable columnstore index. Improving

upon the memory-optimized columnstore
index feature introduced in SQL Server
2012, this feature offers the same query
performance improvements, but the columnstore is now a pure columnar store, so
indexing is no longer required.

Buffer pool extensions. In some cases,

SSDs can be used to expand the buffer pool

when systems run out of memory.

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Resource Governor for I/O. In addition to

governing and managing CPI and memory,

the Resource Governor now manages I/O
requests.

Backup enhancements. With this release,

backups can be encrypted. Azure can also
be used as a target for backups.

Managed backups. Small and medium-

sized businesses, in particular, may find this

new managed backup capability beneficial,
as it offers a simple set it and forget it
model of backing up, eliminating the need
for a backup expert.

Compatibility and hardware

requirements should be understood
before committing to upgrade.
Before executing an upgrade, businesses
need to check with ISVs or in-house application developers to make sure all software is
compatible with SQL Server 2014. They also
need to prepare for any changes and deprecations that might occur in migrating to the new
release.
Since SQL Server is the back end for missioncritical applications, IT organizations should
baseline the current environment, using tools
like Profiler and Perform. Comparing baselines
made before and after the upgrade allows IT
to know that everything is running as
expected in the new environment.
Backups provide a safety net if anything goes
wrong during the upgrade. Good documentation of configuration settings for SQL Server
and the individual databases are also necessary for a successful upgrade.

While most databases are still on-premise

either physical or virtualbusinesses may
consider moving them to the cloud. Whether
using IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) or SQL
Azure, businesses can often benefit from
increased scalability and lower capital costs
than when hosting on-premise.
Even when staying on-premise, SQL Server
2014 has minimal hardware requirements, as
shown below.

SQL Server 2014 was designed

to run over a wide range of
hardware, supporting anything
from desktop with SQL Server
Express to full-blown enterprise
applications supporting large
businesses and enterprises.
Michael Otey
Component

Requirement

Processor Speed

32-bit x86 implementation:

1.0 GHz
64-bit x64 implementation:
minimum of 1.4 GHz,
recommended is 2.0 GHz

RAM

Recommended minimum
for Standard Edition and above
is 4 GB

Free disk space

Minimum of 6 GB

Although the majority of implementations are

64-bit, SQL Server 2014 still supports 32-bit
implementations, since many legacy applications are still in use.

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Best Practices
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SQL Server 2014 Enterprise,

BI, and Standard Editions

32-bit implementation

64-bit implementation

Windows Server 2012 R2

Windows Server 2012 R2

Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

Windows Server 2008 R2

SP1

Windows Server 2008 SP2 64-bit &

32-bit
SQL Server 2014 Standard
Edition

Windows Server 2008 SP2

Windows 8.1 64-bit & 32-bit

Windows 8.1

Windows 8 64-bit & 32-bit

Windows 8

Windows 7 SP1 64-bit & 32-bit

Windows 7 SP1

SQL Server also supports Windows Server Core with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and higher.
This allows the database to run on a minimal hardware platform, reducing the attack surface and
making the system more efficient.

Two upgrade pathsin-place upgrade and data migration installare available

for SQL Server.
The SQL Server upgrade path selectedin-place upgrade or data migration installis often
based on the DBAs preference. Both paths are available in the SQL Server Installation Center.

Installation

In-Place Upgrade

Data Migration Install

Install a new version over the older

version; SQL Server can be upgraded
to SQL Server 2014 using this method
from:

Install a new instance.

SQL Server 2012 SP1

SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2
SQL Server 2008 SP3
SQL Server 2005 SP4
OS

Uses the existing operating system.

Typically uses a new operating system.

Registry and patches

Keeps existing.

Requires new.

Speed

Faster upgrade method.

Slower upgrade method.

SQL Server configuration

Keeps the current configuration.

Requires a reconfiguration on the new

system.

Code and data files

Keeps existing.

Requires a migration.

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for Migrating to SQL Server 2014
There is downtime in both upgrade paths,
although in-place downtime is more significant since the database will be down during
the entire install, rather than just during the
cutover, which is the case with the data
migration install.
Although the data migration install path is
slower, some DBAs prefer it because they are
able to control which patches are applied and
they consider it less prone to data corruption
that can occur with an in-place upgrade.

New features, such as AlwaysOn, must

be supported with application changes
or by third-party software to apply.
As part of the upgrade, IT organizations
should also consider which new features they
wish to use so they can set up the system
appropriately.
With SQL Server 2014, many businesses are
moving to AlwaysOn for improved database
availability. While database mirroring was
limited to two databases, which were both
either synchronous or asynchronous,
AlwaysOn allows for up to eight secondary
replicas, which can be mix of synchronous
and asynchronous replication.

You can combine multiple

databases, and the failover
is pretty fast. Its faster than
failover clustering.

Although AlwaysOn offers better databaselevel protection than database mirroring and
failover, there are challenges that need to be
taken into consideration.

Application changes may be necessary.

AlwaysOn supports an active configuration,

where online databases are used for read/
write, and replicas are used for read-only to
offload processing and for running backups.
Supporting this read/write split requires
adding read-intent strings into applications,
and identifying questions and stored
procedures to route to read-intent strings.

Replication requires awareness. The

replication functionality has its own set of

challenges. When asynchronous replication
is used, it is possible to serve stale data,
resulting in a data loss. Read-intent strings
are server specific, and AlwaysOn load
balancing is limited. Also, if the server
defined in the string is unavailable, the
system cant redirect to an available readonly replica.

Auto failover has limitations. It creates

application errors, and failover between
data centers must be manual.

DBAs should also keep in mind that support

for T-SQL is deprecated in SQL Server 2014.
Non-ANSI outer join syntax is no longer
supported. Additionally, compatibility levels
are only to the prior two versions; SQL Server
2014 does not support SQL Server 2005.

Michael Otey

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Best Practices
for Migrating to SQL Server 2014
ScaleArc offers businesses a faster
time-to-value for SQL Server
upgrades with automatic support for
many 2014 features.
ScaleArc is a database load-balancing solution
that sits transparently between the web or
applications and the database servers. This
software provides an abstraction layer that
allows applications to address the entire SQL
cluster without knowing how that cluster is
located or configured in terms of roles and
responsibilities for individual servers.

With no ability to queue

inbound queries during
failover, SQL Server may
complete the failover but
dropped connections and hung
applications will force a restart.
Varun Singh

When paired with AlwaysOn, ScaleArc helps

organizations get value from SQL Server
upgrades faster. Businesses can right-size
environments and spread the load effectively
across multiple servers. As a result, organizations dont need to over-provision the primary
server, which can also lead to a reduction in
licensing costs.
Geo-aware load balancing allows businesses
to run active-active configurations across
multiple data centers. The software will keep
reads localwithin the same data center
and send writes to the primary in the appropriate data center. ScaleArc enables all this
functionality without changes at the application layer.
ScaleArc allows businesses to set replication
threshholds, so that data older than a certain
number of seconds isnt served from that
outdated read server.

The ScaleArc solution also supports transparent scale out, helping businesses understand
the kinds of workloads running on the databases and seamlessly spread the load across
multiple servers. As soon as new nodes are
added, ScaleArc automatically distributes the
load across that new resource to improve
performance.

Automatic failover is handled in concert with

AlwaysOn. ScaleArcs queuing technology
ensures that queries coming in from the
application during the failover window are
queued until the secondary server is promoted to primary and ready to take traffic.

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Best Practices
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Every single query that is

offloaded from your
primary is improving the
amount of resources you
have available on the
primary. You can actually
do more writes as a result
of that.
Varun Singh

Additional Information

For more information on ScaleArc, visit:

http://www.scalearc.com.

Additional SQL Server Resources:

--SQL 2012 Upgrade Technical Guide
--Use Upgrade Advisor to Prepare for
Upgrades

--Upgrade to SQL Server 2014

--Migrating to SQL Server 2014

ScaleArc allows IT organizations to perform

maintenance any time, enabling zero-downtime patching and other services. It can also
help with cloud migrations by simplifying the
migration, providing high-availability solutions
with auto-failover, delivering high performance, and solving future scaling issues.

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Best Practices
for Migrating to SQL Server 2014
Biographies
Michael Otey

Senior Technical Director, Windows IT Pro &

SQL Server Pro

Michael Otey, senior technical director for

Windows IT Pro and SQL Server Pro, is
president of TECA, a software-development
and consulting company in Portland, Oregon.
Michael has covered the topic of virtualization
extensively for Windows IT Pro, having written
several features articles showing how to take
advantage of virtualization in the enterprise as
well as reviewing all of the major virtualization
products.

Varun Singh

Chief Technology Officer, ScaleArc

As Chief Technology Officer, Varun Singh leads

ScaleArcs product development and technology strategy. Varun also served as ScaleArcs
CEO from March 2009 to Sept 2013. Varun is
a technologist with broad experience in
several fields, from running Linux-based BBS
systems in the pre-Internet days to writing
about technology and open source software at
PC Quest, CHIP, Digit, and Network
Computing, to creating Indias top online
technology brands such as TechTree and
Tech2, to hosting technology shows on CNBC,
TV18, CNN-IBN, and ET Now. He led large
web and application development teams as
CTO at Network 18s web division and built
the highly scalable technology behind large
websites like IN.com, MoneyControl.com, and
various other portals.

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