July 16, 2018 at 8:32 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The End of Support
July 17, 2018 at 4:43 am
I am upgrading to 2016 in September but I believe extended support for 2008R2 goes until July, 2019.
July 17, 2018 at 5:00 am
I think it is a HIPPA violation to run on unsupported software if your product is used with protected health information (PHI).
July 17, 2018 at 6:14 am
I would bet that there are a TON of systems on 2008 and/or 2008R2 running in production around the world still. We are working on upgrading many systems this year.
July 17, 2018 at 6:44 am
Vendor applications are often not approved for use on up-to-date versions of database engines. They frequently lag by two or three versions. Add to that the survival rate of software development companies -- meaning their software will never be certified for an up-to-date version of SQL Server -- and you pose a real business issue. Companies are not in business to provide their DBAs with the latest and greatest. They are in business to make money. It is up to us to clarify the risks, costs and benefits of upgrades. While these factors make the life of the data professional more difficult, business concerns (risk, cost/benefit ratios, total cost of ownership), technical skills and technology "evangelism" are all part of the job.
July 17, 2018 at 7:39 am
.. I wonder how many of you view the upgrades as more risky? ..
Most of our instances today are 2014 or 2016, but we do still have a handful of 2005 / 2008 instances hosting 3rd party applications. Most of the upgrades I've been involved in were uneventful. However, two scenarios come to mind where there were issues. The first had to do with porting legacy T-SQL, either deprecated features or (much worse) changes in behavior (ie: SELECT TOP X / ORDER BY). Second, I've seen upgrades impact the performance of large ETL style queries. The old familiar execution plan would be replaced with something new and less attractive which then needs to be refactored. Also, there was recently an issue where upgrading from 2014 to 2016 caused self blocking issues for some parallel insert operations. The lesson learned is to regression test the upgraded database (both functionally and in terms of baseline performance) before going live.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho
July 17, 2018 at 9:45 am
I'm not super "in the know", but can give you my point of view as someone who works with the DBAs. I know that we have several SQL 2008 R2 instances around. I also know that they're working on upgrading. I think they're going to SQL 2016. I know we do have instances of SQL 2016 around.
However, the migration process may be delayed. When I first came to work here we had 3 DBAs. 18 months ago that went to 2 DBAs. Last week one of those DBAs retired, so there's only 1 DBA left. I imagine that his hands are fun right now managing all of those databases, servers, VMs, etc. And knowing how slowly state government works, it will be months before they hire anyone new.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
July 17, 2018 at 10:00 am
gsmith 7350 - Tuesday, July 17, 2018 4:43 AMI am upgrading to 2016 in September but I believe extended support for 2008R2 goes until July, 2019.
Yes, small typo in the blog I guess.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-2008
July 17, 2018 at 6:32 pm
Sorry, typo corrected. Extended support ends in 2019.
July 27, 2018 at 2:53 am
With every new customer asides looking at their Performance issues first thing I check and ask 'Why?' Are the SQL Server Version and Edition.
One of my customers right now is looking at upgrading to 2017 SE instead of going for 2014 EE and this all started by essentially asking "What EE Feature do you need on that 8 GB RAM SQL Box?" Ofcourse mileage may vary from "no Support from Vendor for this Version" to "thanks, so how much time do we need for some initial testing?"
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