SDE Upgrade SQL 2008 to 2012: Does it blow up?

[ThomasColson]

Has anyone gone down the road of a SQL 2008 to 2012 upgrade? I almost exclusively use the Geometry storage format, and SQL 2012 upgrade advisor is complaining about: Warning about client side usage of GEOMETRY, GEOGRAPHY and HIERARCHYID The assembly Microsoft.SqlServer.Types.dll, which contains the spatial data types, has been upgraded from version 10.0 to version 11.0. Custom applications that reference this assembly may fail when certain conditions are true.

I'll naively assume this doesn't affect ArcGIS operations.....?

What about doing in in-place-upgrade versus a new install? There are pros and cons to both, the in-place upgrade could fail, and the new install will take forever, In either case, I have good backups of the server the databases, I just want to go with the least-work option.

[BillFox]

Does anyone have a status update for this question?

[DrewDowling]

Running into this exact same issue. From what I can gather from the searching I've done it should be OK if the client has the correct version of the SQL Server native client. I'm doing it on a test server tonight and will report back if I find any issues.

[ScottFierro2]

It should work fine, we are testing the SQL 2012 to 2016 upgrade in the next week or so. Here's a helpful post regarding some things others have found. I made a post there specific to configurations of the drives that you will see in comments made a big performance difference for several people.

https://community.esri.com/message/398338

[ThomasColson]

Sorry yes. 2008 -> 2012 -> 2014 have all went smoothly. 

[KimSoulliere]

Did you do an in-place upgrade? Other than backups of the databases, any steps in ArcGIS before or after the upgrade, in SDE or ArcServer? 

We are upgrading SQL 2008 to 2012. 

[DrewDowling]

We did an in place upgrade from 2008 RC2 to 2014. The only issue I ran into was poor performance on a couple of feature classes after the upgrade. Deleting and recreating the spatial index on these feature classes fixed  the problems.

[ScottFierro2]

We generally always stand up a new VM for the upgraded database environment. Once we are confident its configured as intended then we migrate a backup of the SDE. Post migration we run some checks and rebuild the stats & indexes on everything (265GB database full compressed) and it usually takes under an hour to complete all that. Thus far we have done this for 2008 R2 -> 2012 for 3 different server/DB environments (DEV, TEST & PROD all migrated same way) and are doing it again for 2012 -> 2016 (doing all 3 environments again).