Know your Snapshot database in SQL Server

A snapshot database is a read-only purpose and  static view of source database. The database snapshot is transactionally consistent with the source database as of the moment of the snapshot's creation.

1.       How do you create snapshot Database? Using

      T-SQL on Query Analyser

CREATE DATABASE [AdventureWorks_dbss1843] ON

( NAME = N'AdventureWorks_Data', FILENAME = N'E:\MSSQL\Data\AdventureWorks_data_1800.ss' )

AS SNAPSHOT OF [AdventureWorks]

GO

2.       Does snapshot database contain log file?

No

3.       If my snapshot database become suspect can you fix it ?

No

4.       Can you backup/restore snapshot database?

No

5.       Can you change recovery model for snapshot database?

No

6.       Can i create table/view in the snapshot database?

No

7.       Can i  use SSMS to create a snapshot database?

No

Source: Microsoft & Paul S Randal(SQLSkills)

Database Upgrade to SQL Server 2008 Tools and Approaches

This is one of the best article to read about Tools and approcaches to upgrade production servers  to SQL Server 2008.

SQL Server Technical Article:

Performing an upgrade is a complex and often risky project. A successful upgrade can provide an organization with a modern platform for development and production. An unsuccessful upgrade can cause lost time and money, and it can create a bad perception for the future.

This paper documents approaches and tools that can help DBAs and developers to achieve successful and mostly painless upgrade of SQL Server databases from Microsoft® SQL Server® 2000 or SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 (or SQL Server 2008 R2).

In the methodology this paper discusses, a SQL Server workload is captured on customer production environment, and then this identical test workload is run on the old and new versions of SQL Server in a test environment to compare performance and isolate any problem queries. For this approach, we use components from the "RML Utilities for SQL Server" set of tools.

Source : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff758640.aspx

SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v5.0

SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v5.0 released by SQL Server Product Group on April 2011. This tool provide automating the migration of Oracle, Sybase, MySQL databses and Microsoft Access databases to SQL Server.
New features includes:

• Migrating to SQL Server upcoming version Denali
• Globalization support for migrating non-English databases to SQL Server
• Support for installation of an extension pack on clustered SQL Server environments
• A number of enhancements focused on Sybase and Oracle migration
• Improved scale and performance of the migration itself
 
Source : http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlcat/archive/2011/04/30/sql-server-migration-assistant-ssma-v5-0-just-released.aspx