I am constantly surprised that senior executives head in the sand approach to the software systems that underpin their business. I once read a statistic that a pretty hgih % of companies that lose their system for a week go out of business within 18 months. Its dificult not be aware of the threats from hacking and virus and phishing and malware ….
Frequently we find sysrems with no proper back up, no test of back ups, no defragmentation, no reindexing, no service packs or cumulative updates. SO I suppsoe In should not have been suprriosed to read the results of a mini poll by SQL MVP Paul Randall that indicated that 53% of SQL databases surveyed were out of support and 51%
To quote Paul: “I urge you all to check your SQL Server instances to make sure they’re running as close to the latest build as possible, so you have the most bug fixes and are supported if you do have a problem.”.
All SQL Server 7.0 builds are unsupported
All SQL Server 2000 builds are unsupported as of April 9th, 2013
All SQL Server 2005 builds are out of mainstream support – extended support is an option until April 12th, 2016 (You should be at least on 2005 SP4)
Any SQL Server 2008 build before SP3 is unsupported. Mainstream support ends on July 8th, 2014, with extended support available until July 9th, 2019
SQL Server 2008 R2 RTM builds are unsupported, and support for SP1 builds ends on October 10th, 2013. Mainstream support of SP2 builds ends on July 8th, 2014, with extended support available until July 9th, 2019
All builds of SQL Server 2012 are currently supported, but support for RTM builds will end on November 7th, 2013 as that will be one year from the SP1 release
