Sharepoint 2013 : Upgrading from SharePoint 2010 - Upgrade (part 1) - Copying Legacy Databases

1. Copying Legacy Databases

At this stage, I shall assume that you have a working SharePoint 2010 farm and a new installation of SharePoint 2013 on different hardware (virtual or physical). In this section, I shall demonstrate the process of setting the legacy databases to read-only, backing them up, and copying them to the new SharePoint 2013 farm—ready for upgrade.

For my examples, I have a working SharePoint 2010 farm with the following configuration:

• Two web applications, one on port 80 and another on port 5000
• A team site collection at the root of the port 80 application—“The Intranet”
• A publishing site collection at the root of the port 5000 application—“The Web Site”
• The publishing site collection contains custom branding
• The team site includes an external content type to a SQL Adventure Works database
• The team site includes an external list based on the external content type
• The farm includes a Managed Metadata Store with a default group, term set, and terms, associated with both applications
• I configured a search service for each of the Intranet and Web Site applications
• I configured the User Profile Service and associated it with the Intranet application

Figure 1 shows a screenshot of an example publishing site with some branding (thanks to Andrew Connell and Andy Drisgill). This site includes a custom master page, custom page layout, some custom CSS, and image files.

Figure 2 shows a screenshot from SQL Management Studio for my SharePoint 2010 farm. I created the databases with prefix ROBDEMO with script when I established my farm, and the Search Service Application databases via Central Administration for the purpose of this demonstration.

Recall, that SharePoint 2013 supports some service application upgrades via database attach. You can upgrade the business data, managed metadata, and search administration, as well as your content databases. Using SQL Management Studio, I shall set each of the following databases (listed previously in Figure 3) to read-only and then create a backup of each:

• ROBDEMO_BDC_SERVICE_DB
• ROBDEMO_METADATA
• ROBDEMO_PROFILE
• ROBDEMO_SOCIAL
• ROBDEMO_SYNC
• ROBDEMO_SECURESTORE
• SEARCH_SERVICE_APPLICATION__PUBLIC__DB_GUID
• SEARCH_SERVICE_APPLICATION_DB_GUID
• ROBDEMO_PORTALCONTENT
• ROBDEMO_MYSITES_CONTENT
• WSS_CONTENT_PUB
• ADVENTUREWORKS2003R2

This list includes databases for the content of my Intranet and public Web Site, My Sites content, the BDC database, managed metadata database, User Profile Service databases, and the administration sites for search. Notice that I did not back up the other search databases because SharePoint 2013 does not support upgrade of the property database and crawl store.

For those of you unfamiliar with SQL Management Studio, the following steps detail how to set a database as read-only:

1. Right-click the database in SQL Management Studio.
2. Select the Properties menu item.
3. Choose the Options category on the right of the dialog (Figure 3).

   

   Figure 3. Setting a database to read-only

4. Scroll down to the option for Database Read-Only.
5. Set the option to True and then click the OK button.

Repeat the preceding steps for all of the databases you wish to set as read-only. I recommend that you perform this operation outside peak usage hours, so that you lessen the impact on your users.

With the databases set to read-only, verify that you can continue to use your SharePoint sites in a read-only state. Follow these steps to create a backup of each of the aforementioned databases.

1. Right-click the database in SQL Management Studio.
2. Click the Tasks menu item.
3. Click the Backup Sub-task menu item.
4. Make sure the backup type is Full.
5. Change the location of the backup, if you desire.
6. Click the OK button to start the backup.

After completing the previous steps to backup each database, you should have a series of backup files in the backup location specified. If you did not change the default location, your backup files will reside in the Backups folder within your SQL Server installation directory. All that remains to complete this section is to copy the backup files to the new SQL Server, which hosts your SQL Server 2013 farm.

You might be tempted to go back to your SharePoint 2010 farm and mark all databases writable again. Remember, the purpose of marking these databases as read-only is so that the data restored to the new SharePoint 2013 farm remains current. If you allow users to write data to your SharePoint 2010 farm, you will have to repeat the backup process again. Of course, if you are testing the upgrade process (which you should), setting the production databases back to writable is necessary to ensure that users may continue to use your production farm while you test the upgrade process.