July 10, 2019 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Waking Up to No Support
July 10, 2019 at 7:29 am
I've had to live with several different software packages that have gone out-of-support. You can get away with it for ages. Emphasis on "getting away with it".
The problem comes is when something out of your control mandates an upgrade. In my experience incremental upgrades are relatively straight forward. The task gets exponentially more complex with the generations skipped. In some cases the effort to upgrade is so great it is worth asking what we actually get out of the software and whether we should migrate to something better. Apart from the Azure/on-premise dynamic this doesn't really apply to SQL Server but ETL tooling, BI platforms it really does.
When my current organisation moved to the cloud quite a bit of software that worked on-premise would not work in the cloud or there wasn't an appropriate licensing model for running in the cloud. Cue big migration effort.
Migrations are not for the faint hearted. They are major undertakings and probably projects in their own right rather than part of a project or story. They can put you in the situation of being one of Steve's "Expert Beginners", starting from scratch now all your hard won knowledge of a toolset is null and void.
Being out-of-support isn't the difficulty, its when the route to an upgrade is blocked
July 10, 2019 at 9:00 am
Amen David. While nothing changes it's all good. There's likely to be a sinking feeling when someone says 'We need to do THIS now...'
July 10, 2019 at 11:18 am
From what little I am able to see it seems like there are a LOT of companies still running SQL 2008R2.
July 10, 2019 at 3:13 pm
From what little I am able to see it seems like there are a LOT of companies still running SQL 2008R2.
There definitely are. You still see questions about SQL Server 2005 and even 2000 from time to time. There's still quite a few users out there using Windows XP, and I'm sure that this time next year Windows 7 will still have a large share of usage.
Thom~
Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
Larnu.uk
July 10, 2019 at 3:38 pm
Fortunately, most of the major 3rd party applications in use today are hosted in the cloud by the vendor themselves, rather than the IT organization hosting them on-premises. Huge monolithic ISV applications running on-premises have long since become endangered species, hiding in the closets of IT departments and dwindling in numbers.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
July 10, 2019 at 3:52 pm
While SQL Server has relatively few patches for security, you never know.
Ironic then, that this Security Patch (KB4505225) was released only yesterday for SQL Server 2014-2017? I wonder if it effects 2012 and 2019, and (more significantly for this discussion) SQL Server 2008/2008R2. If the latter, I doubt it'll get patched now as the release only came out yesterday.
Thom~
Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
Larnu.uk
July 10, 2019 at 3:57 pm
You can get away with it, but security changes the game. I wouldn't hesitate to run a small system on SQL 2000 if I had to, but I'd want it as air-gapped as possible. A few years ago ran into a company that was still running it (on WS2000) for a keycard system. No reason to upgrade, but they also set this as a VM and disconnected it from the network. Good practice in today's scary security world.
July 10, 2019 at 6:34 pm
SQL Server itself is a very stable and secure product. Unfortunately, it sits on top of Windows. When operations has WSUS auto scheduling Windows updates on a database server, I've seen server reboots kick off right in the middle of a midnight ETL or month end process. Of course that's a 2AM call to the DBA.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
July 11, 2019 at 8:34 am
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