Chapter 21. Deprecation feature
With every release of SQL Server, new features are added. Also, some features are discontinued or marked as deprecated, which means that they’ll be removed in a future version of SQL Server. Starting with SQL Server 2008, the deprecation policy is taken very seriously. How seriously? Seriously enough to mention that the first public CTP of the product came with a feature that allows you to monitor usage of deprecated functionality. You may ask yourself: why would I need to track the usage of deprecated features?
Among the possible reasons are the following two:
- You can obtain greater longevity for an application if you’re an application developer.
- You can identify possible upgrade problems for your existing applications before the next release of SQL Server hits the shops.
The deprecation feature consists of two components:
- The SQLServer:Deprecated Features object performance counter.
- The Deprecation category of trace events, including the Deprecation Announcement event class (indicates that a feature will be removed in a future version of SQL Server) and the Deprecation Final Support event class (indicates that a feature will be removed in the next major release of SQL Server).
The complete list of deprecated features can be found in Books Online and has more than nine printed pages. Table 1 displays a few of them.
