Hard to believe I haven't posted in a year. I really intended to make this place a priority but a new job and life changes took over.
A great deal has happened in the SQL world in the last year and I must say that I missed most of it. I have busily been working in a purely SQL 2005 windows 2003 environment without need to upgrade. I think this happens to many DBAs. You learn your systems, you tune your servers, business hums along and nothing earth shattering occurs.
When a new version of the DBMS comes out there must be a compelling reason to upgrade. In fact the time required to investigate, test, and deploy the new version is usually a deterrent to upgrade. You don't have the time or resources to change. These are the things that make the new release cycle for SQL difficult. I know many companies that just recently went to 2005 from 2000. Never mind that they ignored 2008 and that 2008 R2 wasn't even on their radar.
I guess the question for us all is this. How do I stay current in the DBMS version when I can't keep up with the pace of Microsoft development due to my business's requirements? How can Microsoft understand my needs with their heads in the cloud?
S2