MSSQL 2016 warning: Object niku.PRASSIGNMENT.PREXTENSION uses deprecated data type TEXT, IMAGE or NTEXT which will be discontinued for future versions of SQL Server.

Products

• Clarity PPM On Premise

Issue/Introduction

We are running a database upgrade to SQL Server 2016. In the Microsoft upgrade advisor we get warnings on fields that have used the Image column data type or Text or ntext. The message is:

Object niku.PRASSIGNMENT.PREXTENSION uses deprecated data type TEXT, IMAGE or NTEXT which will be discontinued for future versions of SQL Server. 

Example message (happens on various BLOB columns within Clarity): 

Will a Clarity upgrade to 15.8.1 resolve this type of data type mismatch?

Environment

Release : 15.5, 15.6, 15.7, 15.8

Component : CA PPM INTEGRATIONS & INSTALLATIONS

Resolution

The warnings you are seeing are for the later (future) versions of MSSQL 2016 on Clarity PPM BLOB 'image' datatype fields.

Being on Clarity versions 15.5, 15.6, 15.7, 15.8 with SQL server 2016, you may ignore those for now as the 'image' datatype is still supported.

 

Once you upgrade to Clarity 15.8.1 or higher, they will be changed to varbinary data type. The change happens on Clarity PPM code level and applies to both SQL2016 and SQL2017 supported with Clarity 15.8.1.

 

This is how the fields and datatype changes look on database level:

 

• MSSQL 2016 / Clarity 15.6:

 

 

• MSSQL 2016/ Clarity 15.8.1

 

 

• MSSQL 2017/ Clarity 15.8.1: