SQL Server 2000 - Still Pervasive

I could see the percentage not dropping dramatically next year.  With the slowing economy, the cost associated with upgrading (licenses,hardware,man-hours) can be substantial.

Plus, I would suspect that most IT managers are going to be concentrating on having their developers working on projects that have some immediate ROI rather than devote those resources to upgrading.

I think uptake to new versions would be substantially better if there was an upgrade licensing scheme.  Currently you just buy the new licenses and throw the old ones away (or find creative ways to introduce new SQL Server instances to your production environment).  I don't understand all of the caveats of volume licensing, empower, etc. but it doesn't seem like there is a cost effective way of moving from one version to the next, especially if you need processor licensing, Enterprise features, and have multi-socket servers...

I agree with Aaron. And I think that this worldwide economic slowdown will force companies like Microsoft to rethink some of their licensing and marketing plans, getting a bit more creative.

I work for a global company with databases in more than a dozen countries.  We're doing all new product development on 05 but I have pushed for us to stay on 2000 for existing products until 08 has flushed out it's initial bugs.  We won't likely upgrade from 2000 until the next version has come to beta.  That is usually the point where the latest released version is stable.

(IMHO: If MS is focusing on a BETA release, they aren't still knee deep in resolving issues for the current release.)

I used to want to always be on the bleeding edge, but it's become more and more obvious that upgrades just can't always follow a new SQL release.

Many now are suggesting making an upgrade every other cycle so that we're only upgrading about once a decade unless we really need the new features or are doing a major re-write.  (Our 05 deployments have been for new products or major code changes to an existing product that require a full product QA cycle anyway)