For many developers, the killer feature was the ability to run the Developer Edition on Windows XP Professional or even Home Edition, turning their personal workstations into powerful development database servers. This was explicitly supported, unlike the Standard or Enterprise editions which required Windows Server OS.

Since April 9, 2013, all editions of SQL Server 2000 have been completely out of support. This means no more security updates, patches, or official assistance from Microsoft. The mainstream support that ended in 2008 had already ended free incident support and non-security hotfixes.