Are you keeping up with updates for your SQL Engine? I know this is not the easiest thing to do. It is difficult to find a time when the databases are not in use, or you invest a lot of money having failover systems allowing you to perform updates.
Still, the risk of not applying service releases to your database engine can be substantial. I know of one company that had their entire online service shut down for a period of time due to database inconsistency.
Their database volume had grown to a point where it crossed a threshold for a bug in their database engine. The company had not applied any service patches. Three had been released since they had installed the database engine software. Once the database volume reached the point where the bug was exposed, queries from different processes were reaching into the memory of other queries, resulting in highly degraded database performance.
The engine was intelligent enough to recognize the problem and not corrupt the data, or return invalid results. But, the overhead from keeping things accurate radically killed the performance of the database engine.
Times like these are when services like SQL Azure have an advantage. The service handles all upgrades. You are not even aware that your database was offline, because it never went offline during the upgrade process; at least from a consumers perspective.
The downside of a service handling all upgrades is that you have no ability to test if the upgrade will negatively impact your application. Having your own environment, you can (if you have the resources) evaluate how your application will behave using the upgrades before rolling it out into the production area.
The point is, there is a degree of risk in not keeping up with software upgrades or patches. The risk can be one of security, performance, or accuracy. You must determine if the risk is great enough to keep up to date. If so, then you need to have adequate resources to perform upgrades safely with an acceptable margin for disruption.
I’m sure some of you have war stories surrounding upgrades. Why not share one of them as a comment, or drop me an Email at btaylor@sswug.org. You don’t have to identify any company information. Simply share how updates have impacted you either by applying, or not applying them.
Cheers,
Ben