MS SQLServer 2000

how long will it last

[topr8]

we have a database application that uses sqlserver 2000,

i'm wondering what life this server has ... as in now that server 2005 is well established, how long will sqlserver 2000 be supported for?

we are planning a big review and redevelopment, should we upgrade the db server?

basically there is a learning curve with 2005 and we are comfortable with 2000, so there is a development time price to pay if we upgrade, so i'd rather not.

however i'd also rather not get to 2010 (not far away now) and find that sql server 2000 is no longer going to be supported.

... i would add that we can do everything we want with 2000, so we are not looking for increased functionality.

[ZydoSEO]

We are a SQL Server shop... We upgraded from 2000 to 2005 about 2.5 yrs ago. We have a huge site with all kinds of database dependencies. I would venture to say we have 500+ tables in our application, 3000+ stored procedures, use partitioning and all kinds of other features of SQL Server. The switch was relatively painless. We had to make very few changes to code. It was mostly a testing effort w/ minor code changes.

If you have the luxury of having several test environments (we have one for development, another for QA, etc.) I'd suggest upgrading one of those and just begin testing your app in that environment. Chances are 99.9% of it will work out of the box.

The release notes for 2005 did a pretty good job of pointing out potential problems.

[topr8]

thanks for your input, yes there are spare machines around,

but i'm very much heartened by the fact that i should be able to 'import' the application and it should - mostly - work, if that is the case it won't be too painful, i thought it would be more complez than that.

if it does turn out to be the case then obviously it is a good time to upgrade to 2005.

[plumsauce]

Moving applications from 2k to 2k5 is relatively painless.

What is painful is watching a server get flooded with dot.net runtimes and pseudo dll's. The management studio suite requires it.