SQL 2014 Release Date, April 1st

I'm not a fan of anything releasing on April Fool’s Day, but that's not for me to decide. I personally cannot wait to upgrade to 2014.  I want to see the full power behind PCI-e based SSDs pushing extended ram. I want to have the security of having a server go down and it not take out both sides of the Availability Group. If you haven't heard, when one goes off, it shuts them both down. I want to rebuild my partitioned indexes online. I have lots of wants, but how long will I have to wait to install?

I'm torn here. An old theory was to wait for Service Pack 1 before installing anything by Microsoft. Did we replace Service Packs with new versions? How long will we have to wait for the next "version"?  I hope I'm wrong here. I do love new features. I love upgrades. I do not like upgrading every year. 

I have this feeling that we're about to see releases every other year at most. We may quite possibly see a release per year. I do not want to see this happen. larger agencies stay on older tech longer. I think that coupled with the increased prices for SQL Server with the core licensing may in fact push people off of the Microsoft stack. They may not lose enough to hurt them bad enough, but they will lose some. 

What other Database platforms would you all consider? I personally hope we get back to seeing service packs and keep this stack strong. We have too strong of a community to see it split. 

Note: SQL Saturday Colorado Springs

This is a quote from their SQL Saturday posting, "We are encouraging participation in our food drive to benefit the Westside Cares food pantry located at the facility where the SQL Saturday event will take place.  Toward the end of the event, we plan to give people additional chances to win SWAG based on the amount of items each person brings for donation to the food pantry."

I really hope we can we can get enough people to bring food to make a large difference. 

If you disagree, please let me know. I'd love to hear other opinions.