I suspect I’m not alone in that I’ve had SQL 2000 running for a long time with no problems and no real compelling reason to upgrade. It’s not that I’m opposed to the latest and greatest, but it was easier at the time to just add a SQL 2005 instance for times when we needed a new feature than to worry with upgrading stuff that was working quite well.

It’s been on my list for a while – years you could say – and recently I had some unexpected free time, so decided to invest that time in cleaning up a server and removing the final SQL 2000 from the business. I could probably have done it more easily by just upgrading the instance, but instead I took the time to migrate it to an existing SQL 2005 instance on that machine. That gave me a reason to review all the jobs, clean up some naming disparities, and in general just look things over to make sure we had everything more or less as it should be.

It was also a time to appreciate the power of views and some foresight in using them for a shared database we use for sending email. I wanted to make the change during the week without an outage, so being able to change the views while I  moved that db and then alter them again meant that no email was lost and at most it was queued for a couple minutes longer than usual.

What about SQL 2008? Given the clean up just done and the closing down of a few legacy things we no longer need the upgrade to SQL 2008 should be relatively painless, just a matter of finding the time to do it! It’s a Windows 2003 server that has had SQL 2000, now SQL 2005, and soon SQL 2008, so after the upgrade it will be time to think about upgrading the OS. Not a huge priority with me, Win 2003 has been solid and reliable and right now nothing I can think of in Win 2008 that I need. Nice to do, not that important to do.

Given a choice, I’d probably upgrade to new versions as they come out. There’s merit in having all the incremental improvements that come with a new version, and upgrading more frequently forces you to keep things reasonably up to date and upgradeable. Those upgrades come with a cost beyond the license; upgrade time, testing, risk – all good reasons to stay with something that works.