Adventures in Database Renaming

Databases sometimes need to get a new name.  Or you need to swap names.  It can be a royal PITA if the DB is a mission-critical always-being-used everybody-and-their-mother-touches-it-all-the-time thing.

Errors like “The database must be in a state in which a CHECKPOINT can happen” or “Cannot obtain exclusive access to the database” or “This transaction was chosen as the deadlock victim” abound.  Sometimes it’s better to fall back on our old friends, detach & attach.

Let’s paint a picture!

And if you tell ANYONE, that that tree is there, I will come to your house, and I will CUT YOU…

Our ERP database has been chosen by the IT gods to get moved to the shiny new flash storage array, off the old spinning-rust SAN.  This is fantastic news for the business users.  But lo, the executives warn us, “You must do this with no downtime!” (said in my best Brent Ozar PHB-imitation voice).  Of course when we tell them that’s impossible, they say, “OK, you must do this with minimal downtime.”  That’s mo’ betta’.

So what are our typical options for doing a database migration?  Or, more specifically, a data file migration.  See, we’re not moving to a new server, and we’re not moving a bunch of databases together; we’re just moving this one ERP database.  And we’re keeping it on the same SQL instance, we’re just swapping the storage underneath.  Now yes, in a perfect world, both storage arrays (both SANs) would inter-operate and they’d be able to take a snapshot, pass it over, spin it up, swap it out, and our SQL instance would be none-the-wiser.  But alas.

Other options?  Log-shipping, sure; it’s been around forever, it’s very mature, simple, and relatively easy to operate, even if it lacks a bit in terms of automation capability.  But let’s face it, the DBA is going to be sitting in front of his/her screen babysitting this operation no matter what, so that’s no biggie.  Mirroring?  Meh.  Expensive Edition’s still got all the hot action there, and we’re not that fancy.  Availability Groups?  Sure, if we already had them set up & running.  But we don’t.  Sad-trombone.

Back to Basics

So we circle back to the classics, “backup & restore”, “detach-move-attach” routines.  But there’s a hidden gem of a hybrid here: We can backup, restore as a new name, then switch the names!  The catch is, we need to put the original DB in read_only mode while we do this, to prevent new/updated data from coming in.  Now, when we ask the Dev-managers if their overlaying apps/websites can handle the DB being in read-only mode for an hour, they’re much more inclined to say OK to that, as opposed to the DB being actually ‘down down’.

are we talking about “down” time or “downtime”?

Now, there’s a way to do this in T-SQL, and there’s a way to do this in PowerShell.  Both are fine!  I’m not arguing for one or the other — pick a flavor and go with it.  This happened to be a day where I was feeling SQL-ish, not PoSh, hence the flavor I chose.

The Walkthru

In my example we have our “slow” storage drives ‘D’ and ‘L’ (for Data and Logs, respectively).  We’re moving our blessed database to “fast” flash storage drives ‘E’ and ‘M’ (you know, because they come after ‘D’ and ‘L’).  The team managing the dependent apps have given their blessing to have a ‘read-only mode’ maintenance window for the database, as long as the actual ‘downtime’ is mere seconds.

Once the DB is in READ_ONLY, we do a backup,preferably to the flash storage so that it’s faster (and the restore, from flash to flash, will be super-fast!).  We then restore that backup to a new DB on the flash storage drives, and, as expected, it’s speedy-gonzales.

Flash arrays are awesome, btw. =D

Once our two copies of the database are up, we’re ready to take that minuscule down-time.  We kick the users out of it (with SINGLE_USER mode), detach both DBs, and re-attach them (create database .. on (file), (file) .. for attach) with different names!  Presto-change-oh, the ‘original’ DB is now resident on flash storage, and the old slow files are now a DB called “whatever the heck you want it to be, because it doesn’t matter anymore!”.

Disclaimer:  I in no way support nor condone the naming of databases with spaces or special characters.  If you actually name a database something like that, no matter how temporarily, I will find you, and throw sporks at your keyboard.

Assuming you didn’t run into any crazy locking problems or sticky-sessions that denied your attempt to force SINGLE_USER mode or detach the DBs, you should be good to go!  I even considered building all this into an Agent Job, but… I’m worried it would get tripped up and leave the DBs in a half-arsed state that wouldn’t make our Dev-managers very happy.  But hey, that’s what we have test environments for, right?!?

RIGHT.

Here’s the code!  Enjoy.  =)