Uncategorized

SQL Server Versions: Faster! Slower! Wait! Go!

Watch the Latest SelectViews SQL Server Weekly Show
We posted the show to the site on Friday – watch it online here.

SQL Server Versions
I’ve had a number of you mention that you’re concerned about the versioning with SQL Server. Specifically, with the shorter version cycles, new updates, service packs and such coming at a faster rate, how will you manage your SQL Server versions. It’s surely a cursed if you do, cursed if you don’t thing for Microsoft. We all complained when the versions were too far apart. Now that they’ve moved to faster schedules for releases, we’re all over them again for too much, too fast. Yikes.

Here’s some feedback from one reader, James, that mirrored the feedback from many…

"Many of my third party software vendors do not support their products on SQL 2005, so there is probably little chance that they will support SQL Server 2008 any time soon. I’m forced to split these applications onto older SQL 2000 servers and by next Summer I may very well be supporting 3 completely separate versions of SQL Server. Not because I want to, but because I’m forced to by software vendors that don’t want to move as quickly as Microsoft. What incentive do vendors have to provide support for the most current versions of SQL Server if Microsoft is going to be releasing a new version of the DB engine every 2 years? These quick version and service pack releases are just going to make management more difficult for SQL Server DBAs because the decision to upgrade along with Microsoft may be completely out of our hands. You’ve talked a lot about what people are doing about upgrading from SQL 2000. I think that because we must be on the versions that our vendors support we will be unable to upgrade directly from 2000 to 2008 and will most likely be several versions behind Microsoft for a very long time. "

Featured White Paper(s)
Business Rule Mining: Get a Detailed Analysis of your COBOL Applications
LogicMiner can help your organization reduce maintenance costs and prepare for ongoing modernization of legacy applications. … (read more)

How to Deal with managing jobs and job failures in Multiple Data Centers
As a SQL Server DBA, I have often found myself stretched pretty thin trying to monitor SQL Server Agent across a plethora o… (read more)

Application Health Monitoring and Modeling: A practical example to streamline manageability, reduce risk and save costs throughout the application life cycle
As software development teams become more distributed, visibility into systems has given way to isolated pockets of component… (read more)

Distributing a Newsletter with SQL Answers Mail
This whitepaper describes how to use SqlAnswersMail to send HTML-based email from SQL Server 2000 and 2005. It also discusses… (read more)

Breakthrough Data Recovery for IBM AIX Environments – How New Technologies Are Making Data Protection, Recovery and High Availability Easier and More Affordable
Downtime and data loss pose intolerable risks to every business today. From IT departments to the Board Room, managers have s… (read more)