Supporting a higher version of the RDBMS

We have seen this happen too many times – a vendor would state in their presentation or marketing material that their product “supports” a newer version of the RDBMS.  A lot of times we have seen that the vendor just makes sure that their product does not break when running on a newer version of the RDBMS.  They do not take advantage of any of the new features of that RDBMS but since their product’s regression test went through fine after making connection changes and any other trivial changes that they needed to make, it makes it’s way into the marketing material.

That is mis-representation of the truth.  One should be clear in their message whether they really support a newer version of the RDBMS or have they just made sure that their product will run on it but will not take advantage of any of the new features till they come up with a subsequent release.  One of our clients bought a product from a vendor based on that claim only to find out that all the DB code was still using features from 2 releases ago – because of backward compatibility, it was still working but that defeats the purpose.  A proper due diligence should be done if you want to ensure that you get what you want else you might still end up buying and then implementing & supporting a product built on legacy codebase.