data longevity

I was just thinking about the steps required to get this blog from one format to another over the years.  I started blogging in March of 1999, storing my data in the following ways:

• HTML pages, sequentially built and edited by hand.  IIRC these were done in something very basic like Notepad or UltraEdit.  There was no interface for adding / editing posts at that point.
• Access databases took over very quickly.  I was pumping the data into the database by hand first, and then with forms a little later.  Access was implemented here in late March, and took a couple of days to get sorted out. There were two main pages – one to display the first ten or twenty posts, and one to display the “Archive”.
• SQL Server 2000 was implemented on my web host in December 2000 and I immediately jumped at the opportunity to use it.  I had been programming with it in work for a few years at that point, but it was always a very expensive option for a host to supply. It was a pretty basic database server, but it managed pretty well under load.
• SQL Server 2005 was rolled out in February of 2006, around the time that I was starting to think about moving to a new hosting company.  I used this at work a lot more than on DaveWhite.Net.
• SQL Server 2008 has just been released, and is available as an option to me.  I’m not going to take it straight away though, as I didn’t take part in the beta test and don’t really know that much about it yet.

The data been been available on the web with probably not more than a week downtime since March ‘99.  That really isn’t too shabby for something that didn’t start with a design plan… it was more of an organic growth from page to a fully fledged database driven back end.  It is only this year that I have started letting “someone else” be responsible for how I handle the data.  Before this, I had complete control over the database structure.  Now, of course, I am using an open source blogging system, even though I own the data, I didn’t specify how it was setup.  It was a scary thing to do I can tell you… and I think I still have the original blog tables in my database, just in case!