I saw a thread recently where a person wanted to upgrade their evaluation edition to the full edition of SQL Server. There were various pieces of advice, but eventually it came down to an uninstall and reinstall of SQL Server. The person with the problem was clearly annoyed by this and said it was a bunch of work because of security, replication, Analysis Services and more on this Enterprise Edition box.

Someone then commented that you shouldn't have installed all that for an evaluation edition.

Now I wasn't the person that had the problem, but that type of comment would have annoyed me. I've installed literally  thousands of instance in my career, but I've also been called on to work in many more that I didn't install. I'm not sure that I've ever bothered to check whether or not I was using an evaluation edition in any of them. And even if I had checked the version with a "SELECT @@Version", I'm not sure I'd have read the "evaluation" in there. I might have glossed over those words.

We all make mistakes, or we find ourselves in a situation that we didn't want to get into. Unless it happens constantly to someone with the same situations occurring over and over again, this is something we have to live with. We make mistakes and learn from them. That happens in life, and it happens in IT systems.

The next time someone has an issue, give them the benefit of the doubt that the mistake wasn't intentional. Help them out, and point out where they might be able to avoid these issues in the future. Give them hints or ideas about what to think about ahead of time and educate them better.

I'm sure we've all done things that we shouldn't have done. Like forgetting a WHERE clause on a DELETE statement.

Steve Jones

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