SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 Launches
Today is the big launch. Steve B. is giving the launch keynote in San Francisco. I am currently sitting in a meeting room at a competitor's place where I am at for a W3C XQuery meeting watching the live webcast during our lunch break :-). I already provided a list of many (but not all) of the new and improved features of SQL Server 2005. Today's launch has some additional cool tidbits:
On the XML side, we have no benchmarks yet (we should probably design some). But we have several both internal and external customers that built and deployed applications with SQL Server 2005's XML features. One of our internal sites replaced a 4000 line FOR XML EXPLICIT query with a 300 line FOR XML PATH query. Several of the early adopters of SQL Server 2005 already make use of the new XML datatype for storing documents. Some have documents that conform to their respective industry standard schemas. Others use XML and XQuery to process data that quickly changes its shape or is provided by their customers. Since I have not asked for their permission to be named on my blog, I probably better don't give out their names. I will see, if we can show-case one or two over the next couple of months if there is interest. In any case, such real world customer scenarios are in the end much more important than artificial benchmarks. And your feedback on performance and functionality will help us give you an even better experience in future releases.
Some other noteworthy SQL Server 2005 tidbits from the launch:
- The SQL Server 2005 Express Edition has a management tool! It is currently a CTP release, but mainly to be able to give it a beta cycle. It is available for download from the MSDN site for free (as are VS 2005 Express and SQL Server Express).
- About 50 hosting services will provide support for VS 2005 and SQL Server 2005 starting today. Maybe I should find some spare time to build something myself :-).
As to my launch involvement: I will be speaking at the two Swiss launch events later this month and I will also give the launch keynote in Athens, Greece on December 6th. On the way back I got invited to speak at and meet with the Swedish SQL Server user group in Stockholm. If you hang out in any of these areas, I am looking forward to meet you!