Introduction
I have SQL Server personal edition on my desktop, Beta 2 and
decided to upgrade to the RTM (released to manufacturing) version. Mainly since
I have been running Beta 2 on this desktop for five months and was
getting worried that it would expire (I think it had a six month life).
Also, it was Friday and not that busy. I have a
Dell OptiPlex GX110 that has some fast Pentium (after 300MHz, I stopped
worrying about CPU speed on my desktop), 128MB of RAM, a single big IDE hard
drive (after 4GB, I stopped even noticing how much disk space I had) and runs
Windows 2000 Professional, SP1 on my corporate domain. I had installed Beta 2
in July when I got this machine and since have added Windows 2000 Service Pack
1.
The Process – Getting Started
First problem was my desktop CD would not read the disk. A
few minutes of testing verified that my desktop has a problem, so I decided to
use my laptop CD-ROM and share it out across the network. That took a minute on
the laptop, then I opened an Explorer window on my desktop, selected the share
and double clicked the Autorun.exe icon.
The first thing is the splash screen which has options for
installing the server components, installing prerequisites (Windows 95 only),
browsing the help files, reading the release notes, or visiting the SQL Server
website. An image of this is below
I chose Release Notes since I wanted to be sure that there I
could even upgrade Beta 2. In the past, MS has had numerous problems upgrading
Beta software and most installations result in "uninstall" beta and then
install the RTM software.
NOTE:In general, for new software I am not usually concerned with the
release notes before install (how many installs require anything more than
clicking next..next..next). For upgrades, however, I highly recommend that you
read the release notes prior to installing so nothing breaks.
I usually first browse through the release notes looking for
some information about the Beta software, required software or hardware, and
any steps to take to avoid problems. Nothing. So then I do a Find on "beta" and
find one small paragraph that talks about Analysis Services and how you need to
reprocess cubes after upgrading. I know Microsoft is getting better at
installing software and upgrading, but I am still nervous about the upgrade.
I return to the splash screen and select the "browse help"
option. This gives met the familiar SQL Server Books Online application. I then
glance through the installation options for a few minutes, but again, I find
nothing. So then I decide to search "beta" again. I get one hit from the SQL
Server Installation Help book. In this one I find that you can upgrade the Beta
version by choosing "Upgrade" from the setup program.
The Process – Installation
So now I am ready and start the install. First I get some
welcome screen. Not sure why this comes up, but I click "Next" and proceed. The
next screen asks for whether I want to install on my local machine or a remote
machine. There is a also a virtual server option, but it is greyed out. I
choose local and proceed.
Here is where I get the choice to "create a new
instance", "upgrade, remove, or add components to an existing instance of SQL
Server", or select "Advanced Options". Since I read about this a few minutes
ago, I select "Upgrade".
Now a I get a box where I would choose the instance to
upgrade. Since my desktop has only a single instance, the "default" box is
greyed out along with the instance drop down.
I click next and get a dialog
with two radio buttons, "Uninstall" or "Upgrade". I choose upgrade.
(Sorry, I forgot to grab the images as I proceeded, and I can no longer get to the upgrade
screens).
The next dialog gives me the choice to upgrade my SQL tools
and the data. This screen mentions that checking the box allows me to upgrade
the current installation to a newer release of the version. Not sure about that
grammar, but I think I know what this means.
The next screen is the security screen where I can enter the
sa password or use NT authentication. I use NT authentication since I am a
domain admin and this should work.
Clicking next at this point starts the upgrade process. It
first checks to see if it can proceed. After a couple minutes, I get a dialog
that informs me that setup can proceed. I get the opportunity to go back and
change any settings I made or proceed. Since I went through this, backed up,
and went again so I could make these notes, I click "next" and let the upgrade
begin.
After a couple more minutes, I get a dialog that I have some
services running that I need to stop to allow setup to proceed. One of these is
the personal IIS server I have, so I shut this one down. The other is Windows
Media Player where I am listening to some MP3s. Reluctantly I shut this down as
well.
I next get a box that informs me MDAC 2.6 will be installed.
I click next and the real installation begins. I get the familiar VB
installation with the three graphs on the left and the progress bar in the
middle. The installation takes quite awhile, so I suspect that most if not all
files were upgraded.
Once the progress bar completes, I get a message that the
server is being initialized for the upgrade process. Not sure what is happening
now, but I decide to cross my fingers. After a few minutes I get a message in
the screen that a script (1 of 17) is being run. Slowly I watch as each script
is run until we get to 17. The names of the scripts are given as each is being
run, so I suspect one could dig through them to find out exactly what is
happening. I regret to report that I am not that person, so I leave it to
someone else to dig into the internals of what happens during an upgrade.
The process finally completed and I got a dialog asking me
to restart the computer. Since I had to stop my Media Player anyway, I selected
"Yes" and let the computer restart automatically for me.
After the restart, the computer comes up with no errors. I
run Enterprise Manager and it appears to be a bit snappier. I browse a couple
servers, which are all there, alter a table and everything works fine. It even
asks me to save the change script that I had configured before.
I next run
Query Analyzer and the first thing I notice is the drop down which used to
contain all my servers is empty. I am a little excited when I enter the IP of
our production SQL Server which is hosted at another location. The connection
is definitely snappier. When I started using beta 2, this connection was
extremely slow and often I got an error message between the time the client connected
and the query window appeared. As an informal test, I disconnect and reconnect
a few times and it is definitely quicker.I can even create a new window based
on this one. Something that rarely worked with the Beta 2 Query Analyzer.
Verifications
I also run the Beta 2 personal edition on my laptop (Toshiba TECRA 8000, Windows
2000 Professional, 128MB RAM, 4GB )
and needed to upgrade this computer as well. The process was the same with a couple
small exceptions:
- I did not read the release notes 🙂
- After the installation, there was no reboot message
- Instead of rebooting, I restarted the MSSQL service and connected to the server without
and errors. All my servers were still listed in EM. - After a reboot, the same effect in EM as above, no HTML summary page. One other note, all
my SQL Servers were gone and I had to re-register them.
When I clicked on a server name, instead of the HTML summary page, I got a list of the sub folders
in the right pane.
That’s about it. Other than these differences, everything appears to be working and no errors were
reported.
Conclusions
No earth-shattering news in this article. Nothing special,
but I can report that for my simple upgrade from Beta 2, there were no issues.
One thing that I usually look for prior to an upgrade is an article like this
one just to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling before I proceed. Since I could
not find one, I decided to be the guinnee pig for this one. I will tackle a
v7.0 upgrade to SQL Server 2000 on another box next week and let you
know how that works.
As always, send me comments and questions.
Steve Jones
November 2000
