Alvin,

You are correct about SS2000, but most shops have moved on to SS2005 and many are either using or planning migration to SS2008. The use of a Dedicated Administrative Connection, which became available with SS2005, is very useful for DBAs in large shops because it gives a method of access that is not restricted by client traffic, or other port clogging that can happen on the main client connection port.

It would be interesting to see what proportion of shops are still working on SS2000 or earlier. We recently converted the last of our SS2000 servers to SS2005. It is not a difficult migration except for all the DTS pkgs and Jobs. Even using a powerful tool like DTSxChange, that is not trivial if you have a lot of pkgs and jobs.

I work in a health informatics shop supporting medical research on around 40TB of clinical data. The users are statisticians and epidemiologists who build massive complicated analysis queries.

Prior to the migration, we had been allowing the DB users to build their own DTS pkgs, but found they were abusing it. Many were using DTS to do what should have been simple cross-platform SQL references (we have many linked servers to split loads and control security) and in the process they were propagating copies of data tables to platforms where they were not supposed to reside. We solved a major data management issue by stopping that practice when we migrated. Now SSIS pkgs are built to specs by dedicated ETL analysts or the DBAs, and we provided an advanced SQL class for the DB users. It was an eye opener for them and their management.