Error TF255271 while upgrading TFS 2005 -> 2010

When upgrading TFS 2005 to TFS 2010 (using these instructions) and it worked great on my test computer, but when I went to migrate the production server, I received the following error:

Warning Message: [2011-05-12 20:12:14Z] Servicing step Register Integration Database failed. (ServicingOperation: UpgradePreTfs2010Databases; Step group: AttachPreTFS2010Databases.TfsFramework)
Warning Message: TF255271: The team project collection could not be created. The number of steps before the completion of project creation is: 216. The number of steps completed before the failure was 10.

The error message doesn’t give any detail at all, so I opened the log file and found this near the bottom:

[Info   @20:12:19.133] [2011-05-12 20:12:14Z][Error] BisCreateSchema.sql Line 816 Error: Incorrect syntax near ‘,’. (10 of 216)
[Info   @20:12:19.133] [2011-05-12 20:12:14Z][Informational] Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Framework.Server.CollectionServicingException: BisCreateSchema.sql Line 816 Error: Incorrect syntax near ‘,’.
—> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Incorrect syntax near ‘,’.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find the SQL file it referred to, and Google wasn’t much help either – however, it seemed that the SQL file wasn’t actually to blame, especially since the same upgrade process had run flawlessly on my test server a few days earlier. Then I realized that my test server was SQL 2008 and my production server was SQL 2005 – while I didn’t read specifically anywhere that this was a problem, SQL 2005 isn’t supported by TFS 2010.

After much digging, the cause of the error ends up being that the TFS upgrade tool (and TFS 2010 in general) doesn’t support SQL Server 2005. Upgrading the database server to SQL Server 2008 and re-running the process corrected the error and allowed us to complete the migration.

However, I’ve read that SQL 2008 support on TFS 2005 is patchy, so this also obliterates your rollback, if you were planning on one 🙂 If you get this error, hope this helps!