Should you wait for Katmai. - SimonS Blog on SQL Server Stuff

Should you wait for Katmai.

I read Steve Jones editorial inDatabase Weekly today and saw his statement.

"I still recommend jumping from 2000 to 2008 if you haven't already upgraded"

My personal view is that if you are looking to replace your systems then 2005 has some great features that you get out of the box and is now stable.

Some of the most important features for me are around consistency and recoverability. I've had 2 clients in as many weeks that have supsect databases. Something has caused data corruptions and the database is inaccessible.

SQL 2005 has page checksums which are a great mechanism to prevent crap from being written or read from the disk. It is also contains numerous bug fixes that SQL 2000 doesn't.

But this on top of the fact that SQL 2008 (Katmai) will not RTM for a considerable amount of time and the first service pack probably won't be in during 2008 (but what do I know). That means to get a stable SQL 2008 you have to wait at least 14 months.

Further more having native 64bit versions of SQL means that the scalability of SQL 2005 is so much more that SQL 2000 especially on standard edition.

Personally I would move to SQL 2005 now, to benefit from the high availability and scalability features.


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Published 12 November 2007 15:17 by simonsabin
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Comments

12 November 2007 16:43 by Robert MacLean

# re: Should you wait for Katmai.

Can you elaborate on the checksum features in SQL 2005 and how it can prevent/repair suspect DBs?

FYI SQL 2008 will be available for download before the Feb launch date. That date is the marketing launch date. Not sure when the exact one for SQL 2008 is, but VS 2008 (which launches on the same day) will be available this month!

12 November 2007 18:35 by simonsabin

# re: Should you wait for Katmai.

Page checksums, are performed in places which mean that the engine can avoid the page being stored corrupt.

More can be found here,

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/physdbstor.mspx

My understanding is that if SQL or the OS corrupted the writing of data to a page during a transaction, a page checksum check can identify it and rollback the transaction.

It will also alert you to an issue sooner than later if the checksum identifies the problem outside of the above scenario.

And finally if you have enterprise edition you will be able to restore the invalid page.

Ok so in SQL 2008 you can have automatic page recovery if you have mirroring setup but thats a whole other world.

12 November 2007 18:38 by Allen White

# re: Should you wait for Katmai.

Robert, where do you get your info about the RTM of SQL 2008?  The dev team is talking 2nd Quarter for RTM at this point.

BTW, Simon, I agree with you.  I've had conversations with Steve about this and I think he's wrong in skipping SQL 2005 - there are too many solid management features to hold off on the upgrade.

13 February 2008 14:15 by ssqa.net

# re: Should you wait for Katmai.

Missing 2005 means, taking major part from your SQL Server platform. It will be easy to nail the issues now than compared to SQL 2008, as there will be more deprecated features associated within.