We ran Data Migration Assistant on a Episerver database (pretty much latest version, at least latest as of a month ago) and found that it is using a couple of things that are marked as deprecated in SQL Server 2016 and might be removed from SQL 2017.

The report looked like this:

Procedure

Object [dbo].[netConvertPropertyForPageType] uses the old style join syntax which can have poor performance at database compatibility level 90 and higher. For more details, please see: Line 287, Column 5.

An example of "Unqualified join" is

Select * from table1, table2
where table1.col1 = table2.col1

Use explicit JOIN syntax in all cases. SQL Server supports the below explicit joins:

• LEFT OUTER JOIN or LEFT JOIN
• RIGHT OUTER JOIN or RIGHT JOIN
• FULL OUTER JOIN or FULL JOIN
• INNER JOIN

Deprecated data types TEXT, IMAGE or NTEXT

Column

Object dbo.tblScheduledItem.InstanceData uses deprecated data type TEXT, IMAGE or NTEXT which will be discontinued for future versions of SQL Server. For more details, please see: Line 15, Column 5.