Microsoft`s next version of its database, SQL Server "Yukon", can be expected to ship early next year, according to a company spokesman at Tech-Ed 2003 at Sun City yesterday. However, he declined to give specifics.
"If you go on the trend that 12 to 18 months usually go by from beta one (out a month ago), that could mean early next year," said Mark Souza, group programme manager on the SQL team.
"You can see I`m dancing. I`m not giving you an answer. We`ll ship it when it`s ready," said Souza in the well-supported breakout session that covered new features of the database server, codenamed Yukon.
He explained that in months to come, beta one feedback will be investigated, a period of bug fixes will follow, and the process will be repeated before the complete product is shipped.
New features
Souza called Yukon a "big release", with an extensive new features list. He listed manageability features including dynamic configuration support without restarts, virtual tables, asynchronous events, dedicated administrator connection to the database, dedicated tuning advisor, XML ShowPlan and full-text enhancements.
Management tools debuting in this version include SQL Server Workbench (a GUI with integrated authoring and management), SQL Management Objects (managed code and scripting), a high-performance CMD line, SMTP support for SQLMail and an improved SQL Agent.
Programmability features include a Common Language Runtime Environment. The .Net environment is built into the database engine, which "doesn`t mean you have to learn C or C# or the other .Net languages, although that may help to do things a little better," said Souza.
He also highlighted T-SQL enhancements, native XML storage, queuing (built into the database engine), replication from Oracle to SQL, and covered the differences between database mirroring, snapshot views and clustering support. "You can use any of these separately and in combination," he said.
Other maintenance features are online indexing, previously an intrusive function but resolved with lock-release methods for minimal impact, and online repairs.
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