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Identifying Deprecated Features

Dave Mason provides a method for determining if you’re using deprecated functionality on your SQL Server instance:

I’ve wanted to do some Event Notification testing for SQL Server deprecation events for quite some time. The thought process here is that I could send myself an alert to identify usage of SQL Server features that will be removed from the next major version (or future version) of SQL Server. I could then forward this info to development and let them take action…or not (I kid, I kid). Today is the day I finally got around to the testing. I didn’t get very far, though.

Without rehashing the basics of event notifications (this post may help if you need some context), I created an EVENT NOTIFICATION for the TRC_DEPRECATION event group. That group includes the DEPRECATION_FINAL_SUPPORT and DEPRECATION_ANNOUNCEMENT child events. I also created a QUEUE, a SERVICE, and an activation PROCEDURE (for the QUEUE). The proc is simplistic. It takes the EVENTDATA() XML data, transforms it into an HTML <table>, and emails the info to me.

Watch out, though:  Dave discovered something quite funny when he set this up.