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SQL Server 2008… My Take On Some Possibilities
Well, now that we’ve shown just a small fraction of the emails that have come in on this subject, I thought I would share an idea or two about what may work, at least from our collective standpoint for managing servers. I do have to hand it to Microsoft in this regard. We complained that the 5+ year release cycle was too long, then when we get it faster, we find out it’s really a "be careful what you wish for."
One thing is clear – as SQL Server continues to evolve, continues to add features, those features need to get to market. People need time to not only evaluate and understand the features, but also to test them, deploy them, update software around them, get vendor updates, etc. I just don’t think the 2-3 year target is realistic if we’re going to maintain the concept of a major release cycle. Maybe that’s the key.
In a perfect world, it would be nice to have cumulative, rolling updates. These updates can include the features available to-date, then you can select which features to enable, which to disable. Essentially, like the Surface Area Configuration tool, you can control what is happening after the updates are applied. If you’ve used the Best Practices Analyzer, that interface of listing the different things and letting you pick and choose what’s important and key to your installation – that may work.
At some point, if only for Microsoft’s sanity sake, you’d have to have a checkpoint in the cycles. Some way of saying that a given incremental update is a roll-up point in the cycles. While this is similar to the big release approach – the thing that is potentially interesting is the incremental stuff that could happen along the way. The plus side to this is that you’d have a more fluid landscape of options, hopefully available more frequently as the product evolves. The potential downside to this is that it could result in both a continuous flow of stuff to test and deploy (even worse than that of today), and would be a real challenge, to put it lightly, for Microsoft to support.
Another option would be to have a wider window of compatibility and upgrade path options for the product. This would suit those that want to have a 5 year cycle well. They could cycle through the product as they need, applying the then-current release as they came around in their processes. In the meantime, the product may have updated a couple of times, but if Microsoft commits to maintaining the upgrade path, and support options, so you can skip releases reliably and install that 2nd release down the line, this could work.
More management for Microsoft, but I did start this whole thing off with "in a perfect world." In this type of model, the updates could still flow every couple of years (the major releases), but the emphasis could move to knowing the delta between what you have installed now and what is currently available. In reality, this is kind of what’s happening today. People are installing (or looking to install) 2008 when available and may be skipping 2005 altogether. Microsoft is still supporting 2000, and the upgrade path is preserved through a couple of releases, at least as of this writing. Perhaps the answer is a rolling 5-7 year window of upgrade and software assurance support?
I don’t know the answers, and I’m sure Microsoft folks reading this are either exclaiming that I just don’t get it or worse, but I think the approach of selling version upgrades may be an "old model" that needs revisiting. This applies too to Office and I’m sure other applications. I don’t envy the developers that have to support these types of upgrade scenarios. It’s a non-trivial task to manage all of those libraries and make sure you can successfully upgrade.
What do you think? What’s the answer? Drop me a note here and let me know.
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