We had covered the different SQL Server services in one of our blog posts before. You can access that post over here. We had also covered in one of our previous posts that the Notification Services will be deprecated in SQL Server 2008 since there was very poor adoption for it because it was not very easy/flexible enough to use. It is a deprecated feature in SQL Server 2008 which means that even though it is available in SQL Server 2008, it is slated to be removed in the next release. So, in case you are using it, what would be your migration options?
There is no single option as far as we have seen till date. We can however use a two step approach:
1) Collect the information: You can do so by using either Policy Management Feature (can be scheduled or can be on demand) or can use the wonderful Auditing features of SQL Server 2008 including CDC (Change Data Capture) or if you were using Notification Services for performance issues, you can make use of Data Collection elements and extended events.
2) Notify: Once you have collected all the information that you wanted to track, you can then have a SQL Agent job scheduled to send that information to you at scheduled intervals or have DDL triggers configured to alert you or you can even use Database mail configured for the alerts.
If you still want to use Notification Services against the SQL Server 2008 Database Engine, you can still do so – get the SQL Server 2005 Notification Services Components Package RC1 from here. It states:
“This release of the SQL Server 2005 Notification Services components provides interoperability for running SQL Server 2005 Notification Services against either an instance of the SQL Server 2005 Database Engine or SQL Server 2008 Database Engine.“
We would still advise removing that dependency on NS since it will not be available in the future.
