SQL Migration Daniel Abbott Director of Admin Info Systems Contra Costa Comm College Dist Randy Wallace Senior Technical Architect Marygrove College

When did you begin the migration? How long did the project take? When was it completed? How did you prepare for it (data scanners, custom programming scanner, etc.?) The Migration Project

Purchased and installed new hardware in summer 2011 Configuration and installation of the SQL Clean environment was completed October 2011 Migration was completed April 2012 (during DUG) Started running data scanners in summer 2011 Began converting custom paragraphs into Envison reports fall 2011 Rewrote Query Builder reports into SQL Reporting Services throughout the migration Contra Costa Community College District

Began project October Did not buy servers, ended up renting since there was no budget New servers installed March 2011 Plan was to run 3 test migrations with final migration July 4 th 2011 break. Did not need to run DMIG. Completed July 4 th break – 4 days. Several challenges – printing, third-party products, custom integrations Marygrove College

What challenges did you experience with the DMIG process? How long did DMIG take to run for your environment? How big (gigs/records) would you estimate your environment to be? How many times did you run DMIG? DMIG

DMIG ran 3.5 days 1 additional day was needed to defrag indexes The size of our SQL database environment is: – SQL DB: 25 GB – SQL IDX: 135 GB – SQL LOG: 36 GB We ran 9 tests of DMIG before the final migration to production Contra Costa Community College District

The size of our environment pushed ALL of the limits of DMIG! We ran into MANY errors and DMIG constantly timed out Datatel programmers and team leads were involved with every execution Improvements were made to DMIG throughout the project Contra Costa Community College District

DMIG weird error example: Error encountered during Bulk Insert into PERSON table during processing of PERSON file. Fatal: 2627(14): Violation of PRIMARY KEY constraint 'PK_PERSON'. Cannot insert duplicate key in object 'dbo.PERSON ' Contra Costa Community College District

Did the migration result in improved overall performance of Colleague, reduced performance or no noticeable change? Has there been any noticeable impact or improvement to specific Colleague processes as a result of the migration? SQL Impact

Overall we have experienced improved performance – It’s not the great WOW we’ve had with other hardware replacements – We’re still tuning and adjusting parameters Some processes are faster, some are slower – Depends a great deal on computed columns Contra Costa Community College District

Experienced improved performance – Overall performance better more stable – Migrating existing SQL jobs was challenging with a new domain – We’re still running some scheduled process on SQL 2005 as well as Report Manager End user’s running jobs against SQL affects performance considerably – Looking to replicating to separate Enterprise SQL server for Report Manager and end user’s SQL access Marygrove College

What was your approach to reporting from the Unidata environment? What solution did you implement for SQL reporting? How has the transition to SQL reporting been for your I.T. Department and end-users? SQL Reporting

All of our prior to the migration reports were Query Builder, except a few custom Envision reports We took advantage of our Microsoft Campus License Agreement and implemented SQL Reporting Services – At no cost A lot of work for the I.T. Department, Users are VERY Happy Now implementing SQL Report Builder for ad-hoc reporting See Fred Tahan’s session at DUG! Contra Costa Community College District

Use SQL Reporting Services – At no cost – Currently in process of establishing project to migrate from SQL 2005 to SQL 2008 All report development in the I.T. Department – Limited resources to complete – Looking at implementing SQL 2008 differently – Users are frustrated they cannot build their own reports Also do reports from Envision and Studio – Sometimes it is just easier, better control in logic Marygrove College

What consulting services did you purchase from Datatel to assist with the migration? Did you purchase services from another company? How much of the migration did you perform yourself? Consulting and Services

Consulting Services from Datatel: Initial Colleague Installation – clean environment, LPR Minimal services – some programming Registration Health Check (after migration) Other Consulting: Brent Ozar PLF – SQL Server Health Check iData – QB to SQL Reports We did all of the migration ourselves, with a LOT of help from Solution Center Contra Costa Community College District

All in house – your looking at the main resource! Marygrove College

How has system administration (tuning, parameters, maintenance, etc.) changed from a Unidata perspective to SQL? Has there been an impact to staffing the System Administrator, Programmer/Analyst and other positions? Job Duties

No more WUFA Windows maintenance Occasional SQL Reindexing and Defrag No impact to Staffing – Training was conducted during the migration project Contra Costa Community College District

System administration close to the same – Patching is the same – More work since two servers compared to one – I still do a lot of my work at the : – On the rare occasion, I use SQL – System Administrator does a lot of work on SQL Staffing Impact – has skill set in SQL more so than Envision – Trying to get IT staff to adopt Envision more Marygrove College

What would you have done differently? Lessons Learned

Did anyone involved in the migration experience serious physical injuries, loss of mental capacity or were otherwise impaired as a result of the migration? Aftermath

“Daniel and I used to be friends…” Contra Costa Community College District Before During After

Questions from the audience? Questions

Thank You! Daniel Abbott Director of Admin Info Systems Contra Costa Comm College Dist Randy Wallace Senior Technical Architect Marygrove College