October 28, 2008 at 7:54 am
I think it is interesting that we are talking about staying with older versions yet bow to the pressure of the latest anyhow. Specifically the QotD with the majority of the recent questions being about 2008.
I for one, am content with 2005 and don't see any need to make a move to 2008 any time soon. At my current employer, I won't see 2008 for at least another 4-5 years. My last employer did have a tendency to go with the "latest and greatest" which meant that I was using 2005 right out of the starting gate. Fortunately I was our developer for one of our applications so I was able to fix problems as they arose. Our only other vendor had already been working on certifying for 2005 so it wasn't a real issue. We were purchasing new equipment and it just made sense.
Where I'm at now, our vendor did not fully certify their app for 2005 until this summer so we are still running on a 2000 server. It is terribly slow so I'm looking forward to the upgrade in December when our new servers arrive. Slowness aside, it does just work. The only thing I'm doing is some performance tuning, trying to get just a little more out of what we have and keep our users happy.
I do believe that MS should keep the products in mainline support for at least ten years, perhaps longer. It is terribly costly to do upgrades so it just makes sense to stay, if there isn't a real need to upgrade. Our need will be the performance boost 2005 will give us. In fact, on a lesser box we use for testing, the 2005 installation is performing noticeably better than our 2000 installation.
On the flip side, for MS, I can see it being more costly to them to continue to provide support for the much older versions. When I interviewed with their support team here in the Dallas area, I was under the impression that they had separate teams for each version. If that is truly the case, it would be cost prohibitive for MS to continue to support more than the current plus the last release. On that note, perhaps MS should plan their releases at five year intervals rather than three year or even 18 months.
October 28, 2008 at 7:56 am
I truly appreciate your final comment that it would be a sign that Microsoft is "growing up." The people in our companies that produce the product and convince customers to buy it, hence creating the cash flow that cashes our paychecks, are not impressed much by software version numbers and wiz-bang features. They typically want stability and correct data so that the core business can function as smoothly and predictably as possible. By the way, I am finding that most non-techie home users have much the same attitude. The challenge for Microsoft is to generate revenue without requiring me to run the upgrade treadmill.
October 28, 2008 at 8:08 am
Steve Jones - Editor (10/28/2008)
Last time you were unmotivated? Or it was slow? Hopefully it was the former, though I suspect the latter.
Suspicions correct, Steve; the last time I had a slow day :crying:
Semper in excretia, sumus solum profundum variat
October 28, 2008 at 8:14 am
I completely agree not only when it comes to database systems but us IT folks as well. I got my start into SQL Server kind of late and just as I'm getting comfortable in 2005, now I'm expected to know 2008. It's becoming more and more difficult to keep up on everthing I need to.
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October 28, 2008 at 8:31 am
I'm sometimes told that I don't like change, which sounds like a strange thing to say to someone who works in the IT industry. But change for change's sake seems a bit pointless. And why get excited about 2008 if rumour is correct about a new version coming out early 2010?
I'm not convinced about virtualised database environments - I've run into problems trying to reclaim disk space due to runaway transaction logs which bloat the virtual disk. I've ended up blowing away virtual environments and rebuilding them as the virtual disk has been too big to compact. Admittedly this is on development, testing large data imports, but would have thought that this problem arises on production virtualised databases as well.
October 28, 2008 at 8:35 am
The enterprise industry is slow, so it is not important to learn SQL Server 2008 unless you will be starting a new project in the near future.
Note: I am not an expert but I guess majority of enterprise companies are still using SQL Server 2000, or in the process of upgrading to SQL Server 2005.
So yes learn latest product/technology but do not give it highest priority.
It is just my opinion so I might be wrong.
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October 28, 2008 at 8:41 am
Not every DB can be virtualized. By "legacy" I imply a low-CRUD volume DB. There are far more reads than writes. You don't have a DB that grows much in that environment. And in fact, we have that DB in simple mode with hourly differentials, so we don't care much about the transaction log for that one. But I am assuming that most pre-2000 DBs at this late date aren't main production servers for an entire company. May be an invalid assumption, but there were so many issues with 7 vs. 2000 that most people I know made the 2000 upgrade at some point anyway.
October 28, 2008 at 8:48 am
Abbs (10/28/2008)
I'm sometimes told that I don't like change, which sounds like a strange thing to say to someone who works in the IT industry. But change for change's sake seems a bit pointless.
But it is pointless.
If you ask people why they want to do something, their answers tend to fall into one of 3 camps;
1. "Because we've always done it that way"
2. "Just look at all the new features"
3. Valid appreciation of what needs to change and why.
I've generally found one question to be incredibly useful in cutting away the chaff and finding out what's really necessary. The question is, "what are you trying to achieve?". Unfortunately, many people lose sight of that.
Semper in excretia, sumus solum profundum variat
October 28, 2008 at 9:00 am
The standard quote "If its not broke, don't fix it" is similar to deciding whether to upgrade or not. Just because something works fine shouldn't play 100% into the upgrade decision making process, as a number of other varibles are required to make the best decision. Varibles such as, risk of pursuing upgrade, keeping the DBA skills current and benefits of upgrading should be included.
Microsoft are an innovative company and if we think back to SQL Server 4.x days, the product has come a long way and feature rich, thus allowing SQL Server to do more and make our lives somewhat easier. Without the constant product innovation, we wouldn't be able to benefit from improvements that have been made to the product over the years, allowing companies to gain competitive advantage and do more with less.
At some point, you cannot support "yesterday's" technology forever and must move-on to keep innovation engine turning over, thus requirement to push forward and take on the new. It would be costly for any software company to attempt to support "yesterday's technology" along with "today's technology" long-term, thus why we must keep an open mind to upgrading to newer releases and not discount because "it works fine the way it is".
Thanks,
Phillip Cox
October 28, 2008 at 9:18 am
Andy Lennon (10/28/2008)
Agreed. I think Phil's point about longer legacy support is a good one as well. I don't have any experience with Oracle systems, but i would think they're pretty good about this. Can anyone confirm/deny?
Sorry, Oracle terminates support after a certain number of releases as well. From what I recall, they would not provide support unless you were at a certain release. So, I believe MS is actually a bit more flexible here but may be wrong as it has been at least 3 years since my Oracle experience.
David
@SQLTentmaker“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose” - Jim Elliot
October 28, 2008 at 9:41 am
Thanks David. I was merely curious. I figured that Oracle might have a better plan with their focus on enterprise.
October 28, 2008 at 9:53 am
Phillip Cox (10/28/2008)
The standard quote "If its not broke, don't fix it" is similar to deciding whether to upgrade or not. Just because something works fine shouldn't play 100% into the upgrade decision making process, as a number of other varibles are required to make the best decision. Varibles such as, risk of pursuing upgrade, keeping the DBA skills current and benefits of upgrading should be included.Microsoft are an innovative company and if we think back to SQL Server 4.x days, the product has come a long way and feature rich, thus allowing SQL Server to do more and make our lives somewhat easier. Without the constant product innovation, we wouldn't be able to benefit from improvements that have been made to the product over the years, allowing companies to gain competitive advantage and do more with less.
At some point, you cannot support "yesterday's" technology forever and must move-on to keep innovation engine turning over, thus requirement to push forward and take on the new. It would be costly for any software company to attempt to support "yesterday's technology" along with "today's technology" long-term, thus why we must keep an open mind to upgrading to newer releases and not discount because "it works fine the way it is".
Thanks,
Phillip Cox
I have to agree with Phillip. Does anyone remember the big hoohah leading up to 2000 with all the legacy software systems needing a Y2K fix? That whole problem derived from two problems:
1) poor design (it's 1970 but we only need 70 for the year because there is no way we're going to keep this software around for thirty years);
2) unwillingness to change (we invested $50K in this payroll system in 1971 and by God we're going to get our money's worth out of it!)
October 28, 2008 at 9:54 am
Our factory runs on a automation program based on sql server 6.5 (!). At a certain point hardware became an issue, so we created virtual machines using vm ware as mentioned in an earlier post by Jeff Mason. The app is rock solid, mission critical, and attempting to upgrade it to a newer version of sql would certainly break it. It has been 15 years now, and I don't see anything on the horizon for 5+ years that would make us change anything.
October 28, 2008 at 10:06 am
Your comment about MS having myopia with regard to enterprise needs is spot-on. They have always been a desktop company. They have gotten better, but they need to get better still.
Years ago, I was at a MS product roll-out. A MS executive introduced a business partner that demonstrated a programmable mainframe terminal emulator that absolutely blew my mind. I could see applications all over our enterprise for it.
The MS executive, looking at the mainframe terminal running on the desktop, said something like, "Well, it sure isn't very graphical, is it?" It appeared that the man had never even seen a mainframe terminal, much less thought about why a company would need one.
I have seen many examples of MS obtuseness since, but that one was the most shocking.
October 28, 2008 at 10:44 am
IceDread (10/28/2008)
... Btw, "A community of more than 922,000 database professionals and growing", are we really that many? I wonder how that figure of 922k got there, how many old peeps regging new account that are counted several times and those who has not logged in for longer periods of time, are they a part of our community? ...
I'd like to see what the number of users who've posted in the last year is. But that's just me. I think it'd be a more relevant number, but the number of those who browse but not post is still huge. The growth numbers would also be interesting to know: will we have more than a million registered users by the end of the year?
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