Russell Smith is a technology consultant and trainer specializing in management and security of Microsoft server and client technologies. He is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer with more than 15 ...

Brien M. Posey is a freelance technical writer who has contributed to dozens of books and is a six-time Microsoft MVP award winner. SQL Server 2005 reaches its end-of-life milestone on April 12, the ...

SQL Server 2012/2014 delivers compelling new capabilities that make an upgrade worthwhile. Many IT professionals agree that the AlwaysOn Availability Group (AG) feature offers the most value with its ...

In SQL Server 2005, Microsoft introduced the Upgrade Advisor. This was a great idea to be able to analyze your current SQL Server in a safe environment and start the planning process of an important ...

Microsoft has been releasing newer versions of SQL with greater frequency, prompting DBAs to constantly ask themselves: “Is it time to upgrade?” Once that answer is yes, they have a lot of information ...

Brien M. Posey is a freelance technical writer who has contributed to dozens of books and is a six-time Microsoft MVP award winner. Many IT professionals live by the maxim that if something isn’t ...

At first glance, I was a bit critical of the latest version of the Upgrade Advisor. Well, after going through that painful process, I proceeded onto my upgrade from SQL Server 2005 to 2008 using the ...

Sometimes, life really is like a box of chocolates. The same can also be said for software upgrades. Take, for instance, Visual Studio 2008. After all its various CTPs and RTMs, I feel like I've been ...

While this risk is bigger than the upgrade risk (a change to the cardinality estimator in the SQL Server 2014 optimizer impacted a lot of workloads), there are easy ways to mitigate against that. SQL ...

While this risk is bigger than the upgrade risk (a change to the cardinality estimator in the SQL Server 2014 optimizer impacted a lot of workloads), there are easy ways to mitigate against that. SQL ...