We had a major upgrade to our main application recently, so I thought I would share some of the “thoughts from the aftermath.”
The good: We gave the application back to the business 1/2 of a business day earlier than expected. Win.
The bad: We were hoping to give it back a full day earlier
The ugly: we wasted a full day having to rollback and start over
Some lessons learned:
- Full backups ahead of time are a great idea – check
- Restore scripts for those backups are a great idea – check
- Using SQLCMD to apply vendor .sql files is a great idea – check
- Forgetting the -I parameter in SQLCMD is a bad idea (not -i, but -I for Quoted Identifiers, which is false by deafult in SQLCMD, but True in SSMS)
- Not having a full setup lab environment to test everything – bad
- Using the default settings in SSDT Schema Compare – bad
- Re-ordering column order in tables for cosmetic reasons – bad (this one is on the vendor…we had to re-write some code that broke)
- KrispyKreme donuts in the war room followed by a huge box of cupcakes – bad. Didn’t affect the upgrade but I ate too much 😉
Those are the big items.
This post inspired by Tim Mitchell‘s post today : Studying Failures
Feel free to share your deployment/upgrade brilliance or derp moments in the comments below.
Kevin3NF
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