Recently, I've been speaking with customers about upgrading SQL Server.  At times, some customers have a lot of Standard Edition  SQL Server 2005 / 2008 / 2008R2 in their organization and they want to see the features they get when upgrading to SQL Server 2012.  Last week, I sent out some tweets to the #sqlhelp hashtag to see if ...

I presented a webcast on Wednesday on SQL Server Consolidation.  As with many of my sessions (both physical and virtual), I like to ask several questions.  This is NOT scientific, but it is anecdotal. Poll Question #1:  Do you have SQL Server 2000 STILL running in production in your organization today?  YES = 70%, NO = 27%, ...

Last month, I spoke at a SQL Server Firestarter event in Charlotte.  With just about every session that I speak at or webcast that I do since 2006, I always ask for a show of hands on two questions.  The first is ''How many people here are running SQL Server 2000 in production?'', and the follow-up question that I ask is ''How many ...

Whenever I do a webcast or presentation, I always ask the audience to indicate where their organization is in relation to running SQL Server 2000 or running SQL 2005.  Recently, in an audience of about 40 people, more than half of the audience still had more than 50% of their production servers running SQL Server 2000.  One of the ...

If you have systems that are still on SQL Server 2000 and that you are preparing for SQL Server 2005, run the Upgrade Avisor for SQL Server 2008 as well.  So, while you are under the hood of your database and app getting it ready for 2005, get it ready for 2008 too.  There are a lot of new features in 2008, but nothing that was taken ...