Certainly not to encourage people to stay on ancient versions if they don't have to, I took a crack at replicating TRY_PARSE on older versions.

I've stopped supporting ancient versions of SQL Server, and you should, too. I've cleaned up a lot of old, no longer relevant information.

Some more testing of Unicode compression.

I dig a little deeper into Unicode compression.

A quick first look at Unicode compression, introduced in SQL Server 2008 R2.