On 28 June 2013 02:33, Marc G. Fournier <scrappy@hub.org> wrote:
Stupid question, but in an "existing deployed commercial environment happily running Java 5 or 6", are they going to be upgrading their JDBC more frequently then their JDK? basically, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" applies to their JDK, won't it apply to there jDBC too?
No. I'd upgrade the underlying database and major jdbc driver version together, and that may well happen more frequently than upgrading the codebase.
For example, I was working on a Grails 1.3.x codebase last year. Due to some investment in good devops it was very simple for us to upgrade the major Postgres version (and the JDBC driver along with it), but moving to JDK 7 would have required moving to a new major version of Grails, which would have broken a number of things that we didn't have time to fix.
Plus generally I'd want to run the latest JDBC driver when possible just to pick up bug fixes etc. OTOH I might not be so inclined to move to a new version if it were a completely new codebase without a fair bit of testing. Oh well, that's what functional/integration tests are for!