June 4, 2017 at 5:02 pm
I've suffered the problem of not being able to upgrade - I lived with SQL Server 2000 until late 2009, and left my successor as technical director the difficult task of convincing the powers that were that an upgrade to SQL Server 2008 or 2008 R2 would save money in the long term, and reduce costs soon enough not to kill the company. The difficulties arising from getting everything working with the new version were trivial - the existing databases and apps worked fine in SQL 2005 and in SQL 2008, the problem was money - we had contracts with our customers that didn't handle charging them for upgrades of MS Software, and upgrading everyone to the latest version of everything would push our burn-rate unacceptably high unless we could make substantial savings elsewhere. So in reality the inability to upgrade to latest version was caused by having chosen bad contract terms rather that by incompatibility with legacy apps.
In 2003 to 2006, we had a different problem with some upgrades: the interactions between ASP code and SQL Server 2000 changed significantly from one SP to the next, and sometines even on application of one of the monthly updates, because the early versions of Ms software didn't enforce the conditions that the specs said they would, and later versions did. This was a problem because some of the app development in the early days had been done carelessly (almost all software development done before I joined the company was done carelesly, sloppily, incompetently, except from what was done by one team which reported neither to the head of development nor to the CTO) without regard to MS specifications instead of on MS software current behaviour and thus depended on MS not fixing some of its bugs (the apps did things that were documented as not permitted but just happened to work), so I found that almost always I could apply whatever fixes MS provided, but only almost - once I had to delay applying an update for several months because it made our software fail (our fault, not MS's).
It scares me rather a lot that MS now seems to remove features and change interfaces for reasons other than to fix bugs, so that someone implementing something to work on an MS platform may suddenly find it no longer works because MS has chosen to change the interface and make it a madatory update for eveyone - that's where we appear to be now, and it's much nastier that the old days when such changes were mostly to bring the interface into line with its definition - ie to fix bugs - and were optional anyway.
Tom
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