About ten years ago my sister-in-law broke the screen on her mobile phone. She’d had an older iPhone and when she went to upgrade, none of the upgrade processes worked because her OS was so far behind that they couldn’t transfer her information smoothly. She had been avoiding OS updates because they interrupted her life, but that was now a problem because the world had marched so far beyond her version that there weren’t tools, or at least, no one was interested in trying to perform an upgrade across multiple OS versions (I think it was 3 or 5 versions).
I ran into this recently with someone else I knew, but not for a mobile phone. For TFS 2015. This customer had been working along with this older system and is finally ready to upgrade to Azure DevOps in the cloud. They wanted to know if they could somehow upgrade the TFS database and move all that data easily into the cloud. I said this wasn’t likely easy as this isn’t an upgrade, but an export and import of a lot of data. Microsoft offered a path, but it was multiple upgrades before an export/import, which was deemed too expensive. Right now, I’m not sure what they’re doing to do.
I know that many people keep old versions of SQL Server out there. Brent’s population report still shows some 2014 and older databases, and I’m sure there are plenty of 2008-era (or older) instances in use. Many of you continue to run older software because it works. That might especially be true on desktops, where we often install specific software for a task that might not change for years. I think there is plenty of value in older software that works well, though there might be security concerns.
However, for platforms or software where there is a regular upgrade path that you will need at some point, it pays to keep up, at least a bit. Maybe you don’t upgrade with every version, but you likely shouldn’t fall more than two versions behind. Vendors don’t want to maintain compatibility for too long and certainly don’t want to keep providing updates for new features. Even security updates get expensive to produce for old versions with complex test matrices needed to ensure the patches work and don’t break the application.
Software is a bit of a crazy business. In the analog world, if we own a product and it breaks or has an issue, often there are third parties who can repair it, or even create the necessary parts for the DIY market. Software is different, and the pace of change can be a bit overwhelming, expensive, and annoying. We can’t fix old software, heck, we’re not even allowed to fix old software. We can get into legal trouble if we try.
I don’t know if there is any good solution, but I certainly do know that if you manage software, you ought to be careful to keep abreast of how often the software upgrades and when support for previous versions is waning. Even if you don’t care about customer support calls, you likely care about upgrading to a newer version at some point, so make sure you know when they might drop support for upgrading from your version. Stepped upgrades work, but they can be expensive and time-consuming, and if there are issues, often vendors aren’t interested in why the upgrade didn’t work from your extremely-old version to a slightly-less-old version.
I still expect a database version to run for 10 years, but I know that support is tricky, and I also know that I better be ready to upgrade at that time.
Steve Jones
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Voice of the DBA 
When your sister-in-law ran into that issue I would have advised (assuming the info on the phone is worth doing it) to pay whatever charges are involved to replace the screen so that she could update the phone’s OS and get to that data either on the existing phone or on a new one.
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That was part of what they tried, but some of the OS updates had issues and since it was so far out of Support, Apple wasn’t very interested in fixing things.
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I think I speak for many when I say that the issue with upgrades is that too often upgrades aren’t done to improve the product for the user so much as to change it in someway to benefit the vendor (i.e. make it harder to do anything custom w/o paying teh vendor extra to do it for you even when customer customization is allowed) . Updates, depending on the vendor, aren’t always reliable. I agree that falling too far back is a problem but I’d argue that smart practice is to wait for at least the first patch after some new major update or version. I also think “security” is too often used as the excuse to force people to upgrade. not every upgrade makes the product more secure.
It is a shame that Software code doesn’t have a limited copyright, more so than current so that people could fix older software if they wanted to. I’m not a fan of teh Copyright/Patent system in the US as the corporate world over here (mainly Disney) has so abused it that it’s disgusting now how long a corporation can own something. The entire reason for copyright/patent wasn’t to forever enshrine someone’s invention but to allow enough time for it to be profitable and thus worth pursuing but without also being forever owned by someone.
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I do wish copyright was 14+14, as originally specified. Esp for software that will grow old and needs repairs.
I also think it’s easy to think that new software isn’t better. Lots of people are buying the “new” software for the first time and think it’s great. If you’re upgrading, you have a different view, that it might not be much better, but that’s the business for the vendor. It’s unfortunately, different than business in the real world where third party parts can usually be made.
Not always. I’m annoyed with my GE fridge that the ware filter has a RFID code in it, and third parties can’t produce the same filter for less. GE sells a very similar one for older models for about $20, but the RFID one for $50. That feels unfair.
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That thing with your fridge is corporate creep, the corporate worlds ever increasing desire to gain more control over what they sell us leaving us with fewer options. I’m a huge fan of right-to-repair and when I come across these kinds of tactics it just burns my butt. That said, each time the corporates worlds does something like this it inevitably spawns a response eventually and we end up with more legislation we shouldn’t have needed simply b/c of some greedy executives fudging things. Just b/c they can that doesn’t mean they should be able to.
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