Another reason to keep old versions would be if you have to work with SSIS packages, such as migrating them between servers.  You can't connect to a previous SQL versions...

In general (and in specific, really) the best place to go for licensing questions like this is going to be Microsoft.  Either by way of a licensing specialist at your...

Well, this could have some interesting implications for sysadmins: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/23/michael_thomas_appeals_conviction/
"I was authorized to trash my employer's network, sysadmin tells court"

Regardless of whether the guy wins or...

It's quiet in here...

Too quiet...

Someone, somewhere, is up to mischief...

So I recently (and finally) got around to setting up a job to capture the batch requests / sec counter to a table so I can monitor my servers performance.

I'm required to enable encryption for all my SQL servers, so I've had to mess with this some.  We have to set the SQL server to "Enforce Encryption," rather than...

Man, you started me down the rabbit hole with this post!
I went back and looked at all the topics I started and went through a few of them...

On a completely unrelated note to the existing discussion, came across something interesting today (if you don't mind vendor lock-in HARD)
A geo-distributed, ACID compliant, SQL database system...
Google Spanner:...

An interesting trend I noticed in the replies to this article seems to be that pay / pay raises aren't as much of a carrot as people would think.
It...