The light at the end of the tunnel is bright sunshine!
We have RTM'ed today!
Today, we have released SQL Server 2005 and VisualStudio 2005 and the .Net Framework 2.0 to manufacturing. This means the code is baked, done, shipped,... :-). It will be downloadable from MSDN within the day and available through the other channels in a couple of days.
The following is just a teaser for all the cool things SQL Server 2005 will provide:
Enterprise Readiness:
- Multi-platform support: X32, X64 (WoW and native), IA64 Native, Numa Aware
- Multi-instance support with 7.0, 2000 and of course 2005
- Mobile, Tablet, Express (free), Workgroup, Standard and Enterprise – If we don’t have it, you don’t need it…
- Table Partitioning – partition by key easily – drop a partition and add a new one, no need to delete millions of rows
- Upgrade Advisor – (scan your existing 7.0 and 2000 servers and SP’s and get ready for an easy upgrade)
- SQL Server Management Studio – built in the VS IDE and able to manage all services from one UI
- Enhanced Full Text Search – Integrated backup/restore, thesaurus support, 100x faster for index build
- ONLINE: index build, page/file restore, concurrent log and db backup, memory add, fast recovery (online during rollback) – all operations on-line…
- Column level encryption
- Off-by-default – reduced attack space
- Code signing
- Vastly improved diagnostics – Watson dumps allow us to fix 80%+ of customer issues – NO CUSTOMER REPRO -, Dedicated admin thread, Dynamic Management Views (see current server activity)
- Database Snapshots – point-in-time query and reporting
- IPV6 support
- No more “general network error” – specific error messages for all errors.
- Automatic replication of schema changes
- Merge replication 2-5x faster
- Built-in Oracle to SQL Server replication – the only way to go… :-).
- HTTPS synch for mobile users
Integrated BI:
- BI Developer Studio – unique end-to-end integrated developer experience inside VS
- Report Builder – powerful new report design tool for end users with built-in auto drill-through
- UDM for AS – redefines OLAP and analytics
- Integration services (IS) – high performance and enterprise scale data integration and ETL pipeline
- Reporting Services in Express and Workgroup
- RS controls for VS – developers will love this.
- IS – support for web services and XML sources
- AS Proactive Caching – automatically process cubes when data changes in the RDBMS
- 10 New Data Mining algorithms – critical mass for data mining applications
- IS – support for data quality, data mining and text mining – going beyond ETL
- AS now supports multi-instance and integration with SQL profiler
- AS – new KPI framework for defining and displaying KPI’s – business analysts will love this feature.
Developer Productivity:
- T-SQL exception handling
- Service Broker – breakthrough for building loosely coupled web services applications via reliable messaging
- MARS – Multiple Active Result Sets (easier to migrate those Oracle and IBM apps to SQL Server)
- Snapshot Isolation – we have the most comprehensive set of isolation levels in the industry
- Query Notification and CacheSync – Integrated with ASP.Net for much improved performance and easier to code
- CLR Integration – Language choice - User defined types/aggregates, User defined procedures/triggers
- End to End XML – Datatype, XQuery, XML indexing, XSD typing, XML showplan, XML editor best in class, 2x client XML perf improvement
- Large Row support
- Persisted computed columns
- Distributed Query Tracing
- New Query Functions: pivot, unpivot, apply, except, intersect, TOP(n)
- Notification Services – easy to embed into new and existing applications
- SOAP/HTTP connectivity to the server
- ADO.Net tracing
- SNAC – no more MDAC versioning issues!!!
In addition, we have vastly improved the engineering tools and processes and quality testing over previous versions of SQL Server. For example, we've done 40x more stress testing hours that SQL Server 2000 and did countless security threat analysis.
We also did lots of customer testing. We provided 15 ISV upgrade labs around the world upgrading over 200 ISV applications to SQL Server 2005 BEFORE RTM!
All of our core business applications run on SQL Server 2005 today, over 100 applications, some of them multi-terabyte databases! Talk about "eating your own dogfood"!
We have over 50 customer applications in production today from all over the world (you will see them mentioned at the launch).
Thanks for all the feedback and help and see you at the launch events.
On my part, I am gearing up for the launch events in Switzerland and Athens, Greece where I will be presenting in late November/early December.
We are also already working on defining SP1 and the scope of the next releases. So let the suggestions, questions and feedback continue to roll!