SQL Server Backward Compatibility Details

Installing SQL Server

Installing SQL Server

SQL Server Backward Compatibility Details

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 adds many new features. Most of the changes are internal and will not affect your database scripts or applications. All Transact-SQL statements are compatible. However, administration tools or scripts should be updated to work with SQL Server 2000.

The backward compatibility topics in this section contain a detailed list of features and behaviors supported in SQL Server version 6.5 that have changed and could possibly affect your administration tools or scripts. These changes are not controlled by the backward compatibility level.

To indicate their potential effect on administration tools or scripts, feature changes have been grouped into four levels.

Level Consists of
1 Administrative statements, stored procedures, or SQL Server items that have been removed from, or are no longer supported in, SQL Server 2000. Administrative tools or scripts using these items must be fixed prior to using SQL Server 2000. For more information about these features, see Level 1: Handling Discontinued Functionality.
2 Important changes that produce different behavior from earlier versions of SQL Server. For example, items in this category are those that have changed behavior in data type conversion or usage of selected functions, changed behavior of clauses in selected Transact-SQL statements and stored procedures, changed column names in selected system tables, and changed behavior due to the database compatibility setting. For more information about these features, see Level 2: Handling Major Changes to Behavior.
3 Items supported for backward compatibility only. Any item included in this category is fully supported, but may be removed or unsupported in a future release. SQL Server 2000 provides features that accomplish these tasks more efficiently and have ongoing support. For more information about these features, see Level 3: Updating to Improve Earlier Functionality.
4 Minor changes that produce different behavior from earlier versions of SQL Server. For example, items in this category are either ignored or have one or more ignored parameters, changed byte lengths, added parameters or columns, or changed data type columns. For more information about these features, see Level 4: Handling Minor Changes to Behavior.

Note  You might find it helpful to review SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server version 7.0 as well.