It finally comes to this date, 12th April 2016, the end of support for SQL server 2005! SQL 2005 is with us for 10 years, its one of the major upgrade from SQL 2000 and is one of the major step that bring SQL to success. Everything has its ends and today is the date for SQL server 2005.
You should already heard from many others that SQL 2005 is going to end, and you should be upgrading to other version of SQL (keep in mind that SQL 2008 and 2008 R2 already ended their mainstream support). I would hope that you should already upgraded all your SQL 2005, if you haven't, what does it really means to you?
It goes the same with all products in Microsoft, what it means for a product that has end of extended support is that MS will no longer release patches (bug-fixes or security fixes) for that product, you can however, discuss with MS that you wanted to extend your support with a yearly premium, and pay for every bug-fixes or security patch. That can be one of the option, but a costly one. If you do not want to take that approach, you can still use the SQL 2005, but you will no longer have support from MS in case of any issue you encounter.
Just a reminder, if you did purchase service assurance with SQL 2005 license, you are entitle to upgrade to the latest version (or any version in-between) of SQL and change your license to that version. By changing, I mean to covert, as you might recall, starting from SQL 2012, the licensing of SQL changed from per processor to per core base, if you have the old SQL 2005 per processor license, you should discuss with MS to convert your license to per core if you upgrade to SQL 2012 or later.
SQL server 2005 was a great product, I do like it very much, but its time that we move forward and enjoy the new feature of the later SQL version which helps us improve the overall performance.
