In my experience it’s normally unsupported 5 years after they released an updated version. The enterprises probably haven’t bothered to update because it requires too much time to plan, or the people responsible have long since moved on and the knowledge has been lost.
Probably not M$ being the bad guys. You can’t support ancient versions forever.
Very much this. I dislike M$ as much as the next guy but it isn't always their fault. The biggest reason we have outdated SQL in my experience is older software that clients do not want to pay for an upgrade for that uses a sql backend that will break if we have the databases in compatibility mode.
Just like M$ with good reason (mostly) end of life's an OS they need to no longer mainstream support older software versions.
I have never had a problem upgrading a SQL server. Granted, we aren't talking about anything fancy like database sharding, but the janky applications I work with have never complained.
What? There's lots of reasons to complain about Microsft, but their legacy support is not one of them. Almost every product they make gets 10 years of support + 3 more if you pay for it. In comparison, Postgres only does 5, MySQL is 8, and Mongo is 3.
its generally just consumers on the consumer OS who have that image of Microsoft.
take for example their Xbox Division. Microsoft is the o nlu company where its possible to throw in an OG xbox game in their modern console and play it (after a compatibility patch). Both nintendo and sony couldnt even fathom that kind of backwards compatibility. Microsoft is also the one who keeps up their digital store (on console) the longest
I had to deploy a couple MS SQL clusters years ago, I'm fuzzy on the details but for whatever reason we needed a domain admin to enable clustering and instead of following the permissions on the KB they gave up just made the service account a domain admin.
To this day I'll never understand why a vendor would choose MS SQL or Oracle if they don't have a very specific function that they need.
At least some of the app developers have realized that if they develop for Postgres they get to keep the Sql Server licensing costs for themselves. Windows server licensing costs too, if they're clever.
Unfortunately the old janky enterprise shit will probably never get updated. You know the ones. The ones that think they're new and hip because they support SSO (Radius only)
Because no one wants to learn something new like postgres, vendors haven't adopted other databases platforms other than SQL, and licensing is absolutely stupid expensive for SQL, so most companies just stay on what they currently run. It costs money to hire new employees who know other databases types, and it costs money to train current employees, it's just an absolutely stupid vicious cycle Microsoft has created. The barrier of entry for new versions of SQL is so high, that it's just not worth the hassle and the price.
According to chief strategy officer Roel Decneut, the biz scanned just over a million instances of SQL Server and found that 19.8 percent were now unsupported by Microsoft.
Still, the finding underlines a potential issue facing users of Microsoft's flagship database: Does your business depend on something that should have been put out to pasture long ago?
Sure, IT professionals are all too aware of the risks of running business-critical processes on outdated software, but persuading the board to allocate funds for updates can be challenging.
Decneut, an 18-year Microsoft veteran before joining Lansweeper in 2019, was on the SQL Server 2008 and 2012 launch team.
Not that Microsoft is alone in facing the problem of customers sticking with outdated code years – or decades – after support ends.
Stokes also noted that DBAs are similarly reluctant to be limited in this way and invoked the ghosts of COBOL and FORTRAN to illustrate his point.
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Oh I’m sure, I have a few left that I’m planning on moving away from soon but have to get approval for paying for vendor support for it and get approval for the brief outage. Some of us aren’t allowed to do it over the weekend or even overnight without regulatory approval