"T-SQL is a wonderful language," said Paul Flessner, senior vice president of server applications at Microsoft. "We're not going to orphan it in any way. As long as there's a SQL Server, there's going to be T-SQL."

Some users have no plans to shift away from T-SQL. Mediterranean Shipping Co. worked with SQL Server 2005 for months as a participant in Microsoft's Technology Adoption Program and went live with the database earlier this year. But at the time of the product's official launch, the company still hadn't bothered to enable the CLR, which is turned off by default in the new database.

Mediterranean Shipping has more than 7 million lines of business logic written in T-SQL and employs 25 programmers who specialize in that language, said Fabio Catassi, chief technical officer at the Geneva-based operator of container ships.

Catassi said he thinks the CLR is best used for managed code on the application server and on the client - not in the database layer. He said Mediterranean Shipping will stay with T-SQL for its databases, with the possible exception of smaller projects. "If you have a large amount of data, T-SQL is still the fastest way of manipulating [it]," Catassi said.

Developers for years have had the ability to write stored procedures in Java for Oracle and IBM databases, but most haven't made use of that option, according to analysts and officials at the vendors.