I removed the old Betas of Visual Studio and Yukon from my home machine this morning and to check everything was still OK I fired up Query Analyser to fire a quick query – “SELECT TOP 5 * FROM sysobjects”. This failed with a syntax error complaining about the TOP 5 part of the clause.

I was about to bite the bullet and reinstall SQL 2000 as well but noticed the database I ran the query in was an old one. A quick switch to the master database and the same query works fine. It turns out the previous database had a compatibility level of 65 so none of the new syntax will work.

One thing did get hosed on the uninstall – SQLDMO which is crucial for Enterprise Manger to run. To fix it execute the following:

regsvr32.exe “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\80\Tools\Binn\sqldmo.dll”