I love how Microsoft treats deprecated and discontinued features in SQL Server.
No, seriously. I give Microsoft a lot of sarcasm and lip around here, but Microsoft takes serious care to make it easy to upgrade versions without worrying about your application breaking. If you disagree, hear me out for a minute.
“Discontinued” means it’s dead and removed.
The Books Online page for discontinued database engine functionality is pretty doggone short. There have only been a few things deprecated in the last several years:
Big Data Clusters PolyBase scale-out groups A few database-scoped configuration options And a few others