Yes, you should have a side-by-side install.
The only problem that we ran into was specifically related to reports that connect to an Oracle database (reports connecting to MS SQL Server were fine.) For some reason, the database links disappeared from the SQL. The links appear correctly in the Database Expert, but the joins are missing from the SQL. We had to actually recreate the reports from scratch to get them to work. This is simpler than it sounds, though, because we could copy and paste from the old report to the new one to get all of the formulas, parameters, etc. I had it down to about 1/2 - 1 hour per report - still a long time when you're upgrading @150 reports!
-Dell