Time to upgrade your old SQL Server, here is why:
As Microsoft has announced, end of Support for SQL Server 2012 is only months away (July 2022) and now is the perfect time to upgrade to SQL Server 2019 within your organisation.
COMPLIANCE
Organisations need to keep up with strict compliance and regulations. New threats have made it harder than ever to secure data and applications. With end of support SQL Server 2012 approaching, your system may fail to comply with regulatory standards. This could expose you to security attacks and compliance risks with regulations such as GDPR – leading to business complications and financial penalties.
CYBER SECURITY
End of support SQL Server 2012 means the end of critical security updates, opening the potential for business interruptions. Worse still, without regular security bulletins, it is impossible to guarantee protection against hackers or malware.
MODERN FEATURES
Reduce your pain points, embrace the speed at which technology is advancing and enjoy all the new features that have been added since SQL Server 2012 (or 2008!). Whether you update to SQL Server 2019 enterprise editions, you may qualify for Power BI report Server where you will reap the rewards in efficiency and modern analytics features.
How Keystream Analytics Can Help
Being data warehouse, SQL Server, and Business Intelligence experts, puts Keystream Analytics in a unique position to advise you on the best route for your upgrading and expanding your analytics capabilities. Upgrading from SQL Server 2012 or 2008 to 2019 is often done in house, but if you don’t currently have the capacity/expertise for such a project, Keystream Analytics experts can take it off your hands.
In this case study, you can read about our work with Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospital (DBTH) in a data warehouse migration from SQL server 2012 to SQL server 2019 enterprise.
Client Background
Doncaster and Bassetlaw Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust is one of Yorkshire’s leading acute trusts, serving a population of more than 420,000 across South Yorkshire, North Nottinghamshire and the surrounding areas.
Hosting three main hospital sites and several additional services, the Trust is one of only five Teaching Hospitals in Yorkshire and by 2018 is projecting to train 25% of all medical students in the region, while we currently train 30% of all other healthcare professional students.
Value Delivered
A new BI solution was required, making use of the latest data warehouse technology and a self service portal for business users. Keystream Analytics has provided DBTH NHS Trust with improved tools and mechanisms that will enable data-led insights and better decision making. The first step was to upgrade their SQL Server 2012 to 2019 and migrate all their existing data onto new infrastructure and software without interrupting crucial day to day operations and reporting. This was a vital step for DBTH as their system could have been exposed to threats and malware due to unsupported systems. Furthermore, the environment now has new valuable features and tools such as Power BI Report Server and Machine Learning.
Benefits of Power BI Report Server:
- Power BI has the ability to convert legacy SSRS reports
- Evolving at a rapid pace, with Microsoft releasing regular updates for additional functionality
- Has a firm grasp of areas, including natural language querying and ETL functionality
- A very easy tool to access, particularly due to its similarity to other Microsoft Office software
- Excellent for scenarios where all teams need to have access to some level of basic self-service reporting
- Most intuitive and accessible tool for beginners, in the market
- More predictive analytics and better visualisation than SSRS
- Current market leader (according to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI tools)
- Can add and use an extensive range of Power BI visuals available in AppSource/Marketplace
Machine Learning in SQL Server:
Machine Learning Services in SQL Server is designed to support data science tasks without exposing your data to security risks or moving data unnecessarily.
Benefits include:
- Avoids data movement and data risk by bringing analytics to the data
- Integrates the best features of open source with Microsoft’s enterprise capabilities (R & Python).
- Easy to deploy and consume predictive models
- Integration with existing workflows
- Unified governance across analytics and storage
Data Warehouse Migration – Our Approach
Keystream Analytics have used these 10 effective steps in order to successfully migrate data from the old system to the new without interrupting the Trust’s daily operations.
Some benefits of upgrading to Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise 2019
|
Scalable big data solutions and virtualisation: |
|
Big Data Clusters |
|
Query data from multiple external data sources through the cluster |
|
Easily merge and analyse high-value rational data with large-volume big data |
|
Intelligent query processing and In-memory Database: |
|
In-Memory Database OLTP |
|
Intelligent query processing |
|
Real-time operational analytics Intelligence performance |
|
Security: |
|
Always encrypted |
|
Backup encryption support |
|
Disaster recovery to Azure Dynamic data masking and row – level security |
| BI and Analytics: |
|
Integration services managed as a server |
|
SQL SSAS direct query |
|
Power BI Report Server with Software assurance Master data services Machine Learning |
