Do You Support the Ancient Ones?

Are you still supporting SQL Server 2000? How about 7.0 or 6.5?

Officially, Microsoft support has ended for these products. I know plenty of companies that are still using SQL Server 2000. Even within Microsoft SQL 2000 is still in use. Mostly it's old internal applications that no longer have development budgets and have entered the "sustained engineering" phase. In other words, no one is willing to pay for the labor to upgrade it, and no one is willing to pull the plug. Or maybe there's just one person still using it, but that one person has enough stroke to keep the application on life support.

I read a good article called Ordering Tables To Preserve Referential Integrity posted on SQL Server Central recently that included a script for calculating a logical order for tables based on defined referential keys. Someone requested a version of the script that would work on SQL Server 2000, and the author, R Glen Cooper, gladly posted an update for SQL 2000.

That got me thinking that I think it is time to stop officially supporting SQL Server 2000. I have frequently in the past posted versions of scripts that are compliant with SQL Server 2000 T-SQL. More recently, most of my writings have been on features that do not exist in SQL Server 2000 (such as database mirroring), and thusly SQL 2000 never entered the picture. Going forward, I will no longer be posting scripts specifically written to work in SQL Server 2000. I will gladly help out if someone needs a script for SQL 2000, but it will be by request only.

Chime In

I'd love to hear if other people are still supporting SQL Server 2000 and to what degree. Please post any feelings you may have on the subject.