Yes, standards change but they are still standards. One of the ANSI-SQL standards had a 30 character limit on object names. Fantastic, a bone fide excuse to kill the ridiculous practice of putting tbl in front of tables and vw in front of views. The next ANSI standard increased the limit...
Just to continue, one of things being debated on this thread is the idea that CLR cursors are faster than T-SQL cursors... Ok, maybe that goes without saying... maybe not. My question would be, if you're interested in performance, why would you use either? The tired old saw about ...
I checked afterwards what would have happened if I had given the actually correct answer of "one". (You have to violate 1NF to do it, but you can do a many-to-many in a single table joined to itself by a delimited list stored in a single column, or other variations on that.) I ...
It's the same in SQL. 2005 is better than 2000 (and I LOVE 2000). 2008 may have better reporting tools than 2005. Set based design is better than any row by row. Then there are realities. I have a big customer that right now can't upgrade from 2000. So new data types, CTE's...