I’m running a production instance with version 4.2 and I have not had sufficient time to prepare for an upgrade. If Atlas forces an upgrade and my application breaks, I will be an unhappy customer. My application is IoT and the solution has been running with nearly 100% uptime for 5 years, so I’m not really interested in upgrading. I was forced to upgrade once in the past, and there was considerable effort invoved. Now I must do it again, and the application has grown, so it requires even more effort.
Is there any way to get an extension on the Apri 30, 2023 deadline?
Since MongoDB 4.2 series will be out of support in April 2023, it’s actually best if you can prepare to update the application to use MongoDB 4.4 series. Out of support means that it will receive no further updates, including any bugfixes.
Unfortunately at this moment this is the reality of software development. It takes considerable resource to keep supporting older versions, and since MongoDB first released the 4.2 series in August 2019, it’s been supported for almost 4 years.
In many cases, older driver versions still support newer server versions to some extent, although you’ll be missing out on newer server features. We try to keep backward compatibility as much as possible so as to allow smooth upgrade experience, so I encourage you to at least try connecting your existing app to a testing deployment running 4.4.
Thanks for your reply. I need an additional month to be able to prepare for a proper upgrade to 5.0. My application has about one hundred queries, and we’re a small team (me). I’m actively working on a port to 5.0, so having to test for 4.4 on top of that will increase my effort.
I don’t recall getting into this fix in all the decades that I spent working with SQL databases. There were standards like ODBC and ANSI, which were not perfect, to be sure, but backward compatibility was considered an important goal. The MongoDB “Strict API” is a move in the right direction, but it came along too late for me to take advantage, unfortunately.
I’m fine with not having bug fixes for a month. As a paying Atlas customer, I’m just hoping for a little consideration. I can get the job done by end of May, but not by end of April.