It's getting louder.

Mon Feb 28, 2005 by byrmol

The marketing has cranked up a gear, which would seem to indicate they are getting a good response from the betas.

Looking here (features) and here (pricing), we see 4 commercial breeds of SQL Server 2005.

I have to say that the Express addition is my show stealer here. 1GB RAM, 4GB database size, GUI interface, no query governor. That much grunt for “free” is outstanding. A well built app and a good db design, I honestly think this little animal could handle a large portion of the average small business data demands for both web and internal use. Small business is a relative term, but you get my drift... I haven't read the EULA for Express so you might not be able to use it that way...

I am disappointed with the Standard edition on only one point. Online indexing (lack of). There are lots of web interfaces driven from the Standard edition and one of the biggest issues is with locking during maintenance. Without that, the advantage over “Workgroup” looks a little weaker from the OLTP point of view.

I'd give 10 to 1 that most DBAs would swap CLR integration for Online indexing in a heart beat. Any takers?

Good points include programmability and security enhancements are in all editions and integrated replication with Oracle for the big end of town.

Unbelievably, “Parallel Data Modeling” is available in the Enterprise edition. If you don't know what that is, join the queue. I think what they are trying to say is that somewhere inside the code of SQL Server, Dr Codd lives and is formulating multiple data models simultaneously due to the multi-dimensional nature of heaven and its interaction with C++.

Legacy Comments


Brett (x002548) 2005-03-01	Workgroup? The have a version of SQL for Windows Workgroups? 8-) Looks like Workgroup is the config I use a lot of for standard right now... What's the difference.

rockmoose 2005-03-01	re: It's getting louder. Infinite Drilldown in the enterprise edition!? Does it mean I can analyze my data down to the bit level ? or beyond ? With a Free SQL Express with 4GB limit, one could do almost anything with the right design. Yummy.

spirit1 2005-03-01	re: It's getting louder. parallel data moddelig, huh? isn't that supposed to be better support for hyper threading processors?

robvolk 2005-03-01	re: It's getting louder. And I'll give you 100 to 1 that MS is not marketing any of these releases to DBA's, but rather to developers. Developers don't even know or care what an index is, just let them write triggers and sproc's in C# and they'll buy it. "I wanna instantiate a .Net application every time a row is inserted, how do I do that?"

Notyalc Htrif 2005-03-03	re: It's getting louder. robvolk, Please don't generalise about developers in that way. I am a developer, however I do care about indexes and I don’t give a damn about writing sprocs and triggers in c#, give me TSQL any day. I’m sure that there are other developers out there that do appreciate and understand the implications of choices they make with regards to SQL server. Blah... Can't wait to start using this new stuff but it may be some months away now. I've just had a contract confirmed to migrate an app from SQL7.0 to 2000.