Legacy software whose official support has ended continues to be widely used in U.S. database operations, a survey showed. An analysis said many companies delay replacement despite knowing the security risks because of high costs and complex migration.

TechRadar reported on Sept. 15 that a Percona survey of 300 U.S. database administrators, site reliability engineers and platform engineers found 97 percent said their organisations operate at least some database versions whose official support has ended. Among them, 44 percent said a significant share of their databases are in an end-of-support state.

A major obstacle is that an upgrade is not a simple program update. Changing a database version requires checks across existing applications and libraries, operating systems, configurations and cloud infrastructure. If a migration is done without sufficient testing, failures or service disruptions can occur, and companies may judge that keeping end-of-life software for now is less risky.

Cost is also a major burden. As the biggest obstacle to lowering total cost of ownership for databases, 31 percent cited cloud costs. Licensing costs were cited by 23 percent, too many tools by 17 percent and vendor lock-in by 12 percent.

MySQL is a representative case. Moving from 5.7 to 8.0 brought major changes to the data dictionary structure, authentication methods and some default settings, creating a need for advance verification at the application level. Percona said such changes make it difficult to take an approach of simply upgrading.

The longer updates are postponed, the greater the risk. End-of-support products generally do not receive the latest security patches, leaving sensitive corporate data exposed to vulnerabilities. In the survey, 42 percent cited inefficiency and low throughput in their current database environments as a problem, followed by downtime at 40 percent and latency at 35 percent. Percona stressed that even if it is hard to replace everything at once, companies should first develop a phased migration plan.