In less than a year, Microsoft will completely end support for all editions of SQL Server 2005 as part of its normal support lifecycle policies.
It is encouraging businesses to review their operations in order to start the migration process from now to ensure a seamless transition to a more modern data platform.
To guide businesses through this phase, Microsoft has also published a post on its official blog authored by corporate vice president T. K. ‘Ranga’ Rengarajan. This blog post provides information about the migration tools and partner support that Microsoft is making available to customers.
“Retiring a product is a normal part of the product lifecycle. SQL Server 2005 was released in November 2005 and was a great release for its time. But today, databases need to scale to support more and different types of data. By migrating from SQL Server 2005, organisations can take advantage of modern technology to protect their environments, achieve mission critical performance and optimise their infrastructure investment whether, physical or virtual, on-premises or in a public or private cloud,” said Microsoft.
Customers who are currently running SQL Server 2005 need to identify which of their applications are impacted and actively move forward with migration planning. Customers have multiple options to suit their application needs, including migrating to a physical instance of SQL Server 2014, SQL Server 2014 in a virtual environment (whether on-premises, with a third party provider or in Azure) and Microsoft Azure SQL Database.
Jonathan Vella from Microsoft Malta explained that customers could ensure the protection of their servers with continued security updates and patches from Microsoft.
“More than that, by taking advantage the new SQL Server, customers will be able to achieve mission critical performance such as up to 30 times faster transactions and more than 100 times query performance gains with in-memory, scale across compute, networking and storage with Windows Server 2012 R2 and up to 640 logical processors.
“They can maintain security and compliance since SQL Server is the least vulnerable database platform six years in a row, manage compliance audit requirements and keep receiving support, security updates and hotfixes while optimising their data infrastructure through virtualisation and consolidation of their data platform and the best of on-premises and Azure with hybrid cloud. Migrating web applications to Azure SQL Database ultimately also reduce a lot of administrative needs,” Mr Vella added.