Blog: William McKnight

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SQL Server 2005 is almost here

At CSI, we have a Center of Excellence where we put new releases of BI products through the paces in order to stay on top of the market for our clients.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is about to live up to its title and get released here in 2005. There are quite a few important advances in this release. For those primarily involved with other database management systems, these enhancements may seem like "it's about time." However, some of these, especially the scalability-related items like 64-bit and addressable memory support and reliability items like security controls and improved failover clustering, that have been used to rule out SQL Server for upper-mid and large (i.e., terabyte) mission critical data warehouses are no longer limitations in SQL Server.

Here's some initial points of interest on SQL 2005.....

· 64-bit platform availability (Intel Itanium2 and AMD x64) maximum addressable memory is 32TB although physical RAM has only been tested to 512 GB – still a significant increase!
· XML data types
· Mirroring
· Triggers
· .NET integration allowing object creation with C#, VB.NET and C++
· Partitioning (with automatic recommendations)
· Failover clustering on up to 8 nodes
· Rebuilding the clustering (table ordering) index no longer causes rebuild of other indexes; incidentally indexes are the topic of my most recent column in DM Review Magazine: “Achieving BI Query Performance”· Bulk loading
· Text Searching with FULLTEXT index
· More granular security controls
· SQL Server Management Studio (combination of former SQL Server Enterprise Manager and Query Analyzer components) allows multiple dialog windows (this is seemingly unimportant on the surface, but adds to usability)

I'll continue this topic in later blogs with more feedback. If you have any feedback or anticipatory comments about SQL Server 2005, post them here.

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