The Usual Penalties

"We pay the price, Watson, for being too up-to-date!", he cried. "We are before our time, and suffer the usual penalties."

- Sherlock Holmes, "The Valley of Fear."

A few months ago, I posted about upgrading to Windows 7 / SQL Server 2008 R2. Since then, here are a few things I have learned:

Being up to date is great if you have specific features that you want to take advantage of. The interface of Windows 7 is pretty, but also has some neat little 'gee-whiz' features. When you minimize a progress window to the toolbar, it becomes a little, mini-progress-bar in the toolbar, which I think is quite convenient considering all the downloading of very large files I do. I find that to be somewhat intuitive, and one of those, "Why didn't we think of that before now?" kind of features.

However, I did notice that there were a few applications, specifically some games and editing software, that did not work any more when I upgraded to Windows 7. These were apps that I did enjoy, but I was at least able to upgrade some of the productivity ones to newer versions. The games are a semi-loss. Doom 3 was kind of fun in a B-Movie sort of way, but I'm really not dying to watch it again.

Likewise with SQL Server. (No it's not a B-Movie...) I'm finding that in order to work with a mostly SQL 2005 environment, I still need to have BIDS 2005 around, and that the 2008 R2 SQL Management Studio does some really strange things when connecting to SQL Server 2005; i.e., Sometimes I can view or edit a step in an Agent scheduled job, sometimes it errors out. It's... inconsistent.

I.T. Folk wisdom says you should never install version 1.0 of anything, because there's bound to be problems. This is true, but I think there's bound to be problems anyway, so I don't think that should stop you. There is a bit of caution advised, though. When working on the leading edge, there's likely some compatibility problems to be had with previous generations. I'm now hearing a few grumbles about breaking changes in Denali, which is no surprise, but reminds me that as much as I want to lead the SQL environment forward in my office, I need to remember to stay functional with that which is still behind.

Thanks,

-David.