I was looking over the deprecated features of SQL Server 2014, and what strikes me is how little features were actually discontinued in SQL Server 2014. In fact the only feature discontinued was the removal of support of SQL Server 2005 (90) compatibility level. And that is sorted soon enough. And according to books online, there are no breaking changes when upgrading from SQL Server 2012 to SQL Server 2014. All this contrasts directly with the previous versions of SQL Server where there were numerous discontinued and breaking features. And in the next version of SQL Server (2015??) there are far more features removed than in SQL Server 2014 (10 in fact), but still far less than previous versions. I can’t help but wonder what is in store for the next version of SQL Server…

Of course, if you’re not totally on top of what is being deprecated and what you are using (and who is?!), running this query will return all the deprecated features for a given instance. Then you can check against the Books Online page for deprecated features.

SELECT object_name, instance_name, cntr_value
FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters
WHERE object_name = 'SQLServer:Deprecated Features'
order by cntr_value desc

For one instance of SQL, I had the rather worryingly high number of over 150,000 uses of text, ntext or image. In actuality this is used in the same place multiple times and merely requires an update to use the varchar(max), nvarchar(max), and varbinary(max) data types. And when you consider how some people will have to contend with the deprecation of database mirroring and switch to using log shipping or AlwaysOn AvailabilityGroups (assuming they’re prepared to stump up the readies and pay for SQL Server Enterprise), I’m quite grateful my changes are relatively minor.