NEW FEDERATED DATABASE/FEATURES FOR SQL SERVER 2000

As reported by Timothy Dyck, The linchpin of Microsoft Corp's .Net framework, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, provides a stronger foundation for enterprise data storage through its new federated database features and easier access to data through a rich set of XML interfaces.

SQL Server 2000, which shipped last month, won't persuade customers to switch from other platforms, but it enables Microsoft shops to scale databases higher and access them in new ways.

In tests of gold code, eWeek Labs found it easy to query relational data and retrieve results in Extensible Markup Language, as well as store XML in relational formats, letting SQL Server plug in to .Net's XML-everywhere strategy. Microsoft's use of nonstandard XML-Data Reduced data types does mean some work is ahead for IT to switch to XML Schema when it ships later this year.

The database's new federated database support let us partition a test database onto separate servers and use SQL Server's new distributed view features to spread work among the servers.

This release also offers significant performance enhancements for customers with large data sets. New index views enable the server to precompute results for selected queries, and a new data mining engine let us quickly find relationships and extract summary information from data.

SQL Server still lags far behind competitors in terms of programmability, object-oriented design features and multimedia data-type handling.

SQL Server 2000 runs on a variety of Windows platforms, including Windows NT 4.0. For SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition, a CPU license is priced at $4,999. A similar license for the Enterprise Edition is $19,999. Per-user pricing is also available, starting at $1,498 and $11,099, respectively.

West Coast Technical Director Timothy Dyck can be contacted at timothy_dyck@ziffdavis.com. For a longer version of this review, go to www.eWEEK.com/links.

Contact Microsoft Corp, Redmond, Wash, 800-426-9400, www.microsoft.com/sql.