Migrating site collection from Pre-SP1 to SP2

[JonathanHerschel]

Currently we are migrating site collections via STSADM scripts from pre-SP1 server to staging server (same version), and then upgrading staging to SP2. I was asked if we can keep staging server at SP2 and do migrate from pre-SP1 to SP2, therefore performing migrated AND upgrade at the same time. I don't have a good feeling about it, but I don't have any valid data (other than it isn't best practice) to show that this shouldn't be done.

My Question is: wouldn't the staging sever (at SP2) do an upgrade if restoring [unpacking] from .bak file, or are there specific things done to the database when running PSConfig (wizard) after an upgrade to SP is done that wouldn’t get done by just restoring from backup file?

Any comments would be appreciated.


Jonathan K Herschel

 

[PatricktheAnalyst]

This is a good one, I don't see a reason why you could not, you definitely can't go backward from SP2 to SP1 without restore issues (mostly the infrastructure update) but I can't think of any time I have had issues moving up version.

I would test thoroughly even if the answer here was yes because different customizations could respond differently.


Patrick

http://sharepointglobal.blogspot.com/

 

[JonathanHerschel]

Patrick,

We decided to migrate to staging server, upgrade to SP2 then migrated to new Production server.

with all the time it would take to test, I might as well just do it right.

Here is the feedback I recieved from two SharePoint colleages:
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I don't have any hard data handy, but I would stay away from an
all-in-one-shot process. There are many things done to the DB during an
upgrade and so restoring the DB would leave you with pre-SP2 data structures
but SP2 files/code. Potentially just running PSConfig would take care of
it, but I'd be leery.
[JonathanHerschel: I tried this and nothing happened...]
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I would echo what other guy said in that it would be a bad idea to go straight from pre-sp1 right to a sp2 instance. I honestly don't see a problem occuring with the restores, but as other guy said, you may be left with some lingering old db schemas, etc.

MS basically states that you shouldn't modify 12 hive files AND the db schema because SP's can upgrade things/replace files, so based on that, my assumption would be that you can bet that some of the DB schema will change but you'd be gambling by hoping that restore of a backup file on an SP2 would really apply all those updates.

It wouldn't be too hard to test this out thought to be sure for future reference. If you have access to a virtual that has SP2 on it, you could take the backup and restore it locally. Then, go into SQL server and script out the database schema. Then goto your pre-SP1 sql server and script out that schema. You could then use a DIFF tool on the 2 files and see what is different. Then take the presp1 backup and move it over to the staging server, apply SP2, and then script out the db schema again and compare it as you did previously to see if it matters which way you do things.
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With all this said, we decided to do it right the first time....


Jonathan K Herschel