Should you upgrade to SQL 2008 R2?

You may have noticed in your SOLIDWORKS Enterprise PDM 2011 DVDs, Microsoft SQL 2008 Standard Edition R2 was in the box. If you originally installed EPDM 2010 or earlier, you likely have SQL 2008 Standard Edition installed. Should you use your new DVD to upgrade to 2008 R2?

SOLIDWORKS says you do not have to. EPDM will run fine on SQL 2008, it even runs fine on SQL 2005.

The following capabilities are new to R2 Standard:

• Backup Compression to reduce data backups by up to 60% and help reduce time spent on backups
• Can be managed instance for Application and Multi-Server Management capabilities
• High-scale complex event processing with SQL Server StreamInsight™

In your EPDM environment, the first bullet above is all you care about…a 60% smaller backup file is pretty impressive.

I had to upgrade because a customer sent me a backup of their database and as you can imagine my old SQL could not read this new backup format. The upgrade took about 20 minutes on my M6500 and was very easy. Drop the DVD in the drive and follow the prompts.

Though the smaller backups are nice, I wouldn’t recommend upgrading yet unless your backups are taking too long or you are running into storage issues.

Remember to backup before you upgrade.