It was July 19, 2005. At least, I’m pretty sure it was.

Based on IndyPASS’s meeting history, that second meeting way down at the bottom (use your keyboard’s End key; that’s what it’s there for) was basically a “here’s what’s new/awesome in SQL Server 2005” presentation. I’ve long since lost most of my email from that time, but that meeting makes sense in the timeline of 2005’s release.

During the dark, dark days of 2005, just about everyone was desperate for an upgrade to SQL 2000. I was, and I hadn’t even been here that long. The fledgling Indianapolis PASS chapter met in a good-sized conference room on the ground floor of a Duke-owned office building off Meridian St (“twelve o’clock on the I-465 dial”) on the north side of town. That night, there were probably half-again as many people in that room as it could comfortably hold. People standing, sitting on the floor, you name it. Tom Pizzato, the speaker, was introduced; he walked up to the podium and the first thing he said was, “Welcome to the Tuesday night fire code violation.” That is still the best one-liner to open a technical presentation I’ve ever seen, and ever since, it has been cemented to SQL Server 2005 itself in my brain.

That was a long time ago–It’ll be eleven years here in a couple months. Eleven years is an appreciable percentage of an eternity in the tech world. As a result, earlier this week, Extended Support for SQL 2005 ended. This means that you, if you are still running it anywhere, will get no help from Microsoft were something to go wrong. Perhaps more importantly, there will be no more security patches made available for it. Don’t expect if something big happens, there will be a replay of what Microsoft did for XP.

This is a pretty big deal. If you have any kind of problem that you can’t fix, and you call Microsoft Support about it, you won’t get any help for your in-place system. You will have to upgrade to a supported version before you’ll be able to get any assistance, and in the middle of a problem bad enough to call PSS probably is not the time you want to be doing a Cowboy Upgrade™ of your production database system.

I understand that there are plenty of industries and even some specific companies that are either forced to, or elect to continue to run out-of-support RDBMSes on their mission-critical systems. I supported SQL 2000 for far longer than I would like to admit, and it was a risky proposition. After I transitioned out of that role, there was a restoration problem (fortunately on a non-production system) that it sure would have been nice to be able to call Microsoft about, but that wasn’t an option.

Don’t put yourself in that situation. There are plenty of points that can be made to convince the powers that be to upgrade. The fact that any new security vulnerability will not be addressed/patched should be a pretty good one for most companies. If you have an in-house network security staff, loop them in on the situation; I bet they will be happy to help you make your case.

One final note: If you are still running 2005 and are looking to upgrade, don’t just hop up to 2008 or 2012–go all the way to 2014 (or, once it goes Gold, 2016). SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 are scheduled to go off Extended Support on July 9, 2019. Three years seems like a long way off now, but that’ll sneak up on you…just like April 12, 2016 might have.