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Category: Versions

Downgrading a SQL Server Database

Published 2019-04-19 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason goes against the flow:

One of the recurring questions I see on Stack Overflow is “How do I restore a SQL Server backup to a previous version of SQL Server?” The answer, of course, is you don’t. Upgrading a database to a newer (major) version is a one-way ticket–at least as far as the database files and subsequent backups go. I recently found myself in a similar position as all those hapless Stack Overflow questioners. I had a customer that had migrated to a newer version of SQL and they wanted to roll back to the previous version. What to do?

A couple of thoughts immediately came to mind. There’s the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard and the Generate and Publish Scripts Wizard. Neither of these sounded convenient. In particular, generating a script with both schema and 500 GB of data sounded like a fruitless endeavor. Two other options sounded much more appealing. So I focused on those.

Dave has a couple of creative methods effectively to downgrade a database.

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Trying Out the Data Migration Assistant

Published 2019-04-16 by Kevin Feasel

Dave Mason shares some thoughts on the Data Migration Assistant:

I recently took advantage of an opportunity to try Mirosoft’s Data Migration Assistant. It was a good experience and I found the tool quite useful. As the documentation tells us, the DMA “helps you upgrade to a modern data platform by detecting compatibility issues that can impact database functionality in your new version of SQL Server or Azure SQL Database. DMA recommends performance and reliability improvements for your target environment and allows you to move your schema, data, and uncontained objects from your source server to your target server.” For my use case, I wanted to assess a SQL 2008 R2 environment with more than a hundred user databases for an on-premises upgrade to SQL 2017.

Dave takes us through an upgrade on three sample databases and then gives us some more messages from actual production databases.

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SQL Server and Ubuntu 18.04

Published 2019-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Randolph West confirms that SQL Server on Linux will run on Ubuntu 18.04 even though it is not (yet) supported:

Although these screenshots show SQL Server 2019 preview CTP 2.3, this also applies to SQL Server 2017 on 18.04.2, because that’s what I had installed before upgrading the SQL Server version. However, as my friend Jay Falck pointed out on Twitter, Microsoft has stated publicly that it is not yet certified for production use:

Important, this does not change the support state of SQL Server 2017 on Ubuntu 18.04. Work to certify Ubuntu 18.04 with SQL Server 2017 is planned and we will announce when it will be supported for production use on this page. Until such as an announcement occurs, SQL Server 2017 on Ubuntu 18.04 should be considered experimental and for non-production use only.

Read on for Randolph’s thoughts on the issue.

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R 3.5.3 Available

Published 2019-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

David Smith shares some info on R 3.5.3, released on Monday:

The R Core Team announced yesterday the release of R 3.5.3, and updated binaries for Windows and Linux are now available (with Mac sure to follow soon). This update fixes three minor bugs (to the functions writeLines, setClassUnion, and stopifnot), but you might want to upgrade just to avoid the “package built under R 3.5.4” warnings you might get for new CRAN packages in the future.

Click through for more info on this release, including where the name from each R release comes from.

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Deploying SQL Server Versions with Kubernetes

Published 2019-03-12 by Kevin Feasel

Anthony Nocentino shows how we can upgrade or even downgrade our SQL Server containers using Kubernetes deployment scripts:

There’s a few things I want to point out in our YAML file. First, we’re using a Deployment Controller. This will implement a Replica Set of the desired number of replicas using the container imaged defined. In this case, we’ll have 1 replica using the SQL Server 2017 CU11 Image. A Replica Set will guarantee that a defined set of Pods are running at any given time, here we’ll have exactly one Pod. We’re using a Deployment Controller, which gives us move between versions of Replica Sets based off different container images in a controlled fashion…more on that in a second.

Read the whole thing.

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Big SSAS News In SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3

Published 2019-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb is excited about what’s in SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3:

With the release of CTP 2.3 of SQL Server 2019 today there was big news for Analysis Services Tabular developers: Calculation Groups. You can read all about them in detail in this blog post:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2019/03/01/whats-new-for-sql-server-2019-analysis-services-ctp-2-3/

In my opinion this is the most important new feature in DAX since… well, forever. It allows you to create a new type of calculation – which in most cases will be a time intelligence like a year-to-date or a previous period growth – that can be applied to multiple measures; basically the same thing that we have been doing in SSAS Multidimensional for years with the time utility/shell/date tool dimension technique. It’s certainly going to solve a lot of problems for a lot of SSAS Tabular implementations, many of which have hundreds or even thousands of measures for every combination of base measure and calculation type needed.

Click through for more of Chris’s thoughts and how calculation groups will make your life easier.

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SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3 Released

Published 2019-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

The SQL Server team announces SQL Server 2019 CTP 2.3:

At the SQL bits keynote today, we announced the release of SQL Server 2019 community technology preview 2.3, the fourth in a monthly cadency of preview releases. Previewed in September 2018, SQL Server 2019 is the first release of SQL Server to closely integrate Apache Spark™ and HDFS with SQL Server in a unified data platform.

There’s not a giant list but there are some interesting items on it. Click through for the full list.

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Azure Data Lake Store Gen2

Published 2019-02-22 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra gives us the low-down on Azure Data Lake Store Gen2 now that it is generally available:

When to use Blob vs ADLS Gen2
New analytics projects should use ADLS Gen2, and current Blob storage should be converted to ADLS Gen2, unless these are non-analytical use cases that only need object storage rather than hierarchical storage (i.e. video, images, backup files), in which case you can use Blob Storage and save a bit of money on transaction costs (storage costs will be the same between Blob and ADLS Gen2 but transaction costs will be a bit higher for ADLS Gen2 due to the overhead of namespaces).

Looks like there are still some things missing from Gen2, so don’t automatically jump on an upgrade. Read the documentation first to make sure you aren’t relying on something which isn’t there yet.

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Platform Compatibility and SSDT

Published 2019-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott walks us through platform compatibility in SQL Server Data Tools:

Sometimes you don’t have the perfect development environment for SQL Server, sometimes you deploy to things like SQL Azure and want to test locally, for various reasons it is possible that you want to deploy to one version of SQL Server but set the project properties to a different version of SQL Server. If you find yourself in this situation you might need to use the parameter AllowIncompatiblePlatform
 which essentially says “I know I said the project is for SQL 2017 but I am deploying to SQL 2014”, anytime you say this you also sign the contract that says “If I am deploying to a lower version then I have made sure I haven’t used any keywords or object types that didn’t exist in that version and also if everything fails then so be it, I live with my choices every day”.

The story is a little complicated, but Ed straightens it out for us.

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