Upgrading Geodatabase from 10.2.2 to 10.5

Question

We are upgrading an enterprise GDB from 10.2.2 to 10.5, and also migrating the db from SqlServer 2012 to 2016.

What is the best workflow for upgrading And migrating an enterprise GDB?  Should we upgrade the GDB in place before migrating to a new SqlServer?

ScottFierro2 · Answer

Agree with Rebecca Strauch, GISP‌ and that mirrors our workflow which we have finished with testing and moving to production. We took a 10.2.2 and a 10.3.1 DB both on SQL 2012 boxes and did backup/restore to SQL 2016 boxes that we have now gone to a high availability cluster on the SQL side with failover and DB side replication across the 2 VM's in the cluster and post restore we performed the upgrade to 10.5. The only caveat for anyone going this route do the restore to 1 VM perform the upgrade by direct connecting to the VM directly or you can use the clustered DNS connection but not have the DB replicated to the second server and once the upgrade is done to the first server then use SQL to replicate the DB to the next server because attempting to upgrade with active clustering in place doesn't work. We also have spun up an extra 10.5 DB in the new SQL environment from scratch as we had a need for pulling 1 schema out of the 10.2.2 DB into a DB of it's own. All DBO schema for us.

So can't guarantee our configs are the same and for most they won't be as we are constantly pushing and breaking ESRI limits or back dooring ESRI processes from the SQL side of things but can say it does work. Can read into some of this SQL clustering configs though for any interested here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189910.aspx

RebeccaStrauch__GISP · Answer

Ours is also DBO schema.   Nice thing about SDE is you can spin up as many databases as you need and you SQL allows.  Always best to test this way, then when happy with the process, you can recreate a "clean" production version.  At least that is what I'm doing.

AdamCrateau1 · Answer

Excellent, thanks for the insight Rebecca.

Our SDE is setup with the DBO schema, so sounds like we may end up troubleshooting some different things than what you're seeing.  We have a Dev Server we'll use to test restoring the DB to, and I'll do as you suggest by moving it first and then test upgrading.  I'll make a note to report back once we have some results.