It may not be your Content Databases that need upgrading

I recently had to recover from a disaster with one of our SharePoint testing environments. (This happens to be the only testing environment that is not on virtual hardware.) Fortunately, I do quality assurance testing for a disaster recovery product and it wasn’t long before I had new hardware for the failing database server and could rebuild the farm. I did run into some interesting issues however. After I reinstalled the WFEs and had central administration working again, I reattached the content databases that I had recovered. After all of this my farm worked fine and I had access to all of my Site Collections again. Disaster averted. The health analyzer on the farm kept warning me about upgrading databases though. Specifically the error message that I got was the following; "Database is in compatibility range and upgrade is recommended."  Seems simple enough. There are Powershell commands that I can use to upgrade the databases.

$contentdb = Get-SPContentDatabase | Where-Object {$_.Name -eq "WSS_Content"}

Upgrade-SPContentDatabase -Identity $contentdb

I ran those commands from a Powershell prompt (the SharePoint 2010 Management Shell since that one automatically loads the SharePoint snap-in.) I was then immediately irritated when the upgrade failed.

WARNING: Database [SPContentDatabase Name=WSS_Content] does not need to be upgraded.

So, Central Administration tells me that my database needs to be upgraded, and then when I try to update the database, it tells me that it doesn’t need to be upgraded. I was a little confused. I figured I would try a different approach, so I ran PSConfig on the farm with the “build to build” switch.

psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait -force

This only resulted in more errors.

I then tried to detach and reattach the content databases, since, when attaching a content db, SharePoint should typically upgrade the database if it needs it. That didn’t work either.

I talked with Sean McDonough for a few minutes about the situation and he enlightened me that there is a chance that it is not my content databases that need upgrading. How do you really know though? Time to poke into your content databases to tell for sure.  The first database you need to check is your SharePoint Config database since that is the one that shows you what version your farm is currently using, be it a service pack, or one of the myriad cumulative updates. Run the following in a Sequel Server Management Studio Query.

use SharePoint_Config
SELECT Version
FROM Versions
WHERE VersionId = ’00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000′
ORDER BY Id DESC

This will show you every version that your farm has evolved through. Mine showed one version; 14.0.4762.1000. (This is incidentally the RTM version of SharePoint 2010) I then ran the same query against one of my databases that supposedly needed to be upgraded and found more than one version. 4762 was there, but so was 5128. It would seem that it wasn’t my content databases that needed to be upgraded, but rather the rest of my farm. Now my problem was figuring out which version I needed to end up with after upgrading. Fortunately, Todd Klindt has an awesome reference page here that will tell you which Service Pack or Cumulative Update each version number means with a link to download what you need. I downloaded the Cumulative Update for October 2010, installed it on my farm, and then ran psconfig again to finish everything up. All of those “database needs upgrade” errors were gone and the health analyzer on my farm settled down again. Just to be sure I went to the Farm’s Central Administration, then to “Upgrade and Migration” and clicked on “Review Database status.”  Every database stated “No Action required” instead of the upgrade message.

So, if you have to recover a farm and reattach your databases, or you are attaching your content databases to a new farm, keep in mind that if SharePoint tells you that databases need to be upgraded, it might not be the databases that are in need of an upgrade.

Many thanks to Sean McDonough for his input, and to Todd Klindt for his blog for reference. 

 

Who’s SharePoint installation are you training your users for?

The proliferation of SharePoint in the business world brings new users to SharePoint everyday.  Because SharePoint is so easily customizable, many businesses have optimized their SharePoint installation for their own business needs. Some use SharePoint as a CRM system, some use it for ECM, and yet others use SharePoint as a full blown intranet. While some users may have used SharePoint at a previous company, many others have not.  So if you ask someone if they have used SharePoint you’ll get an array of answers and experience.  The real question should be, “Have they used your SharePoint?” 

Where do you get started?

A comment on one of my other blog posts asked me “Which SharePoint role would be a good starting position?” (I did paraphrase the question a bit. The blog post I am referring to is here.) What an awesome question. Where do you begin? When you are first branching out into the vast SharePoint world and looking for a career, what should your first steps be? What books should you read? What classes should you take? What certifications should you pursue? What’s with all the bacon? Hopefully I can shed a little light on this, and tell people the right place to start to begin on a career involving SharePoint.

Database Mirroring and SharePoint 2010

I was recently tasked with creating a VM environment that had all of the SharePoint Databases Mirrored.  It didn’t need to be anything fancy, so I did not need a witness server.  I found out something interesting when attempting to mirror the Service Application Databases. SharePoint 2010 now makes it fairly easy to register which databases are mirrored and where the mirror is located for some of the databases through Central Administration.  Not quite all of them though.  First we are going to go ahead and set up mirroring for a content DB so that we can get that out of the way. (This took me a while since everything online always seemed to miss one crucial step.)  Once you complete this little guide, you will have a mirrored database that SharePoint is aware of.  After that, I will go through all of the databases that can be set up for mirroring through Central Administration. (I know! Fun! Right?)

How to Solve Problems

I was upgrading my computer’s operating system over the weekend and while doing so, I was also checking all of my files for what to keep and what to let go. I came across something I had thrown together several years back about how to solve problems.  In the company where I worked at the time, the solution to any issues that arose was to let someone go, because they were the problem.  It  frustrated me that the management at this company couldn’t see that the problem was usually not a person, but a bad practice. I have worked at an ISO9001 company before, and even then, problems were still abundant, and the solutions didn’t seem to make sense. In my attempt to alleviate the issues, I wrote down the following guidelines for problem resolution. I’m not a Project Manager, and I am not relaying something I learned in a certification class. This is from my own experience, and should work in any situation where a problem has arisen.

Dear Employers, Please explain to me how someone can be “overqualified.”

Note: I had to rewrite this after I had calmed down a bit.

A friend of mine has been looking for work for over a year now. The last offer that she was turned away from had the same story as many of the others. “We are sorry, but you are overqualified.” I must admit that I’m a little bit baffled by this.  I can understand how someone can be “underqualified” but I’m not sure how “overqualified” can be a negative.  Imagine if we applied this concept of overqualified to a purchase of something like software. The software does everything that you need it to do.  The pricing is less than you were expecting to have to pay initially.  You don’t buy the software however because it has features that you would not use, so instead you go with a competitor’s product that costs more, and does almost everything you need it to do, except for one or two crucial things.  Brand Loyalty notwithstanding, this is an example of poor judgment.

What is your nightmare SharePoint Farm (Not the best of Best Practices…)

We all have them. Those things that drive us crazy.  The things that make us wonder “Were they sniffing glue?” You may have inherited one. You may have left one behind for someone else to inherit. They are out there though, like zombie cheerleaders, waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting Admin or Developer. I am of course speaking of SharePoint farms.  These are the more unwieldy ones though. Not the pictures of grace and beauty that are a dream to manage, but probably more like a site for “Steve’s Rack & Stack Mortuary.” I will admit, I am guilty of creating some of these. When you are new to SharePoint some things frustrate you when they don’t do what you expect.  There always seems to be some little detail that you left out. I’ll tell you some of mine, that I have created, left behind, and encountered. I’m sure there are more out there that you have run into also. Let us know what you have seen that left you sleepless, or done that you might be ashamed of.

SharePoint Roles Revisited. It got better, and worse.

Okay, first things first.  If you haven’t seen it or read it, go here and read my blog post about SharePoint Roles.  Read the comments too while you are at it. Okay now that you have done that, we’ll start with the good news.  SharePoint is super popular with companies now, and it is spreading faster than rumors did at my old high school.  (The only thing that spread faster than rumors at my old high school was contracting mono.) With SharePoint 2010 in the market place now, even more companies are signing on.  This is awesome wonderful fantastic news.  With more recognition of SharePoint in the marketplace, companies should have a better understanding of what the roles are related to SharePoint… right? Right?

Custom Properties of SharePoint Designer Workflow Conditions and Actions

Like I had stated last week, I was going to provide a list of all of the custom properties that could be edited with SharePoint Designer 2010. Took me a little bit to figure out how I wanted to format the list, but I think this will work.  I thought about adding an example for each workflow property I found, but quickly realized that instead of a blog post, I would be writing a book if I did so. If there is not a custom property that can be set that is not available in the regular Workflow Builder interface, I didn’t include it here, since there really isn’t a reason to.

 

The properties of Actions in SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflows

A while back I posted about how to get a workflow to copy a file or list item to another library or list, using SharePoint Designer 2007’s Copy List Item Activity, here.  Well, in SharePoint Designer 2010, some people have found it a little difficult to find the files to edit to make this work. There is also the chance that you may get the text wrong rendering your workflow useless. Apparently the SharePoint people have realized that people may want to tweak their workflows a little more that what the UI in SharePoint Designer offers.

If you remember from the previous article I wrote, and a few others cruising around the web, in order to change certain properties of SharePoint Designer Workflows you had to go digging into the workflow’s xoml files.  If you got the syntax wrong on the property you were trying to change, the workflow wouldn’t quite work properly, if it still worked at all. In SharePoint Designer 2010 they have solved this by giving users a dialog where they can choose the setting for the property that needs to be changed instead of entering it manually. To those of us who love tinkering with workflows this is awesome. We can still dig into the xoml file if we want to, but there really shouldn’t be much need for it anymore. Here is how to get to those properties that used to be a pain to change.