Deprecation of SET ROWCOUNT

SET ROWCOUNT has been deprecated for INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE statements as part of the Database Engine Features since Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2. The statements are available in Microsoft SQL Server 2016, but it is expected that they will not be available in future releases of Microsoft SQL Server.

Please see following link for full list of deprecated features in Microsoft SQL Server 2016: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729.aspx.