Attended a Microsoft seminar today about SQL Server 2005. The scheduled release is sometime this fall. After the most boring keynote speak ever (by some german Microsoft security expert), the sessions were very informative. Jon Jahren did a good job presenting some of the new features and changes in the upcoming version. Here is a short summary:
- Possible to create .Net objects that run in SQL Server. Instead of using T-SQL Stored Procedures you can create code in .Net. Better performance when doing tasks that T-SQL do slowly such as string manipulation. And lets not forget how much fun it is to program using T-SQL, so for developers that haven't touched T-SQL, .Net objects can be a good way of programming on SQL Server.
- User defined data types. For use with custom sorting and calculations.
- Encrypt columns.
- No need to execute system stored procedure for common database administrasion commands such as add user. Can use T-SQL with the normal CREATE/ALTER syntax.
- Oracle like lock handling; versioning. Good for applications that has lots of reads and few writes. Last version of row is kept in Tempdb. So it will mean some overhead and a larger tempdb, but will minimise lock problems.
- T-SQL now has try/catch, pivot tables and ranking (row number for example).
More information about SQL Server 2005 can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/SQL/2005/default.aspx