Microsoft® SQL Server 2012 Unleashed

Compatibility Views

Compatibility views were retained in SQL Server 2012 for backward compatibility. Many of the system tables available in SQL Server 2000 and prior versions of SQL Server are now implemented as compatibility views. These views have the same name as the system tables from prior versions and return the same metadata available in SQL Server 2000. They do not contain information that was added after SQL Server 2000.

You can find most of the compatibility views in the Object Explorer by looking for system views that have names starting with sys.sys. For example, sys.syscolumns, sys.syscomments, and sys.sysobjects are all compatibility views. The first part of the name indicates the schema that the object belongs to (in this case, ...