Introduction

SQL Server 2005 is a feature-rich release, providing a host of new tools for the database administrator as well as the database developer. This book is written to help the IT manager, database administrator, database developer, systems integrator, and consultant to quickly get up to speed on the most important new features found in the SQL Server 2005 release. This book will help you to understand how SQL Server 2005 is different from its predecessors and will provide you with information that you can use to evaluate the benefits of adopting the new release.

In order to get this book out in a timely manner, I needed to make choices about which features to cover and the level of detail to give to each feature. This is both a good news and bad news story. The good news is that Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is packed with new features—more features than any release of SQL Server since its inception. The bad news is that there just isn’t enough space in this book to provide comprehensive coverage of all these features. When deciding between features I leaned toward selecting those features that I felt would be the most significant for the enterprise and those features that embodied the biggest changes from the prior release. Hopefully, you’ll agree that I made the right choices in most regards.

Likewise, to make this new features guide available in a timely fashion, the information presented here is based on the beta 2 version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005. This means that in some cases there will be minor differences in the screens and some of the implementation details that are found in the final RTM (Release to Manufacturing) version and the coverage provided in this book. However, Microsoft has stated that they expected beta 2 to be feature complete and this book is intended mainly as a guide to introduce you to those new features. While I do provide numerous examples showing how to make use of these features, the goal of those examples is to help you to better understand the purpose of the new features and get an idea of their implementation. Moreover, in my experience I’ve found that Microsoft is very disciplined with regard to their beta programs and I expect that all of the major new features presented in this book will be consistent with the final release and that any differences between what is presented here and the final released product will be minor. Every effort has been made to make sure that the information presented here is as up-to-date as possible.

As an additional note I should stress that this book is not intended as a general tutorial on using Microsoft SQL Server. It is written with the assumption that the reader has a basic familiarly with SQL Server. I’ve split this book into three parts— reflecting the three general areas of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 itself. Part I of this book covers the database administration features. Here you’ll learn about the features that are most important to the database administrator. In this section you’ll get an introduction to the new SQL Workbench, which gives the SQL Server database administrator a whole new management experience. In addition in Part I you’ll also learn about the new important security, architectural, high availability, and disaster recovery features the Microsoft has provided in SQL Server 2005.

Part II covers the new features found in the database development area. As you would expect if you’ve read anything about Yukon (the codename for the SQL Server 2005 release), in the press, then you’ve certainly heard that the biggest change found in SQL Server 2005 is the integration of the Microsoft .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) with the SQL Server 2005 database engine. SQL Server’s CLR integration allows any of the .NET languages like C#, Visual Basic.NET or managed VC++ to be used to write stored procedures, triggers, and user-defined functions. Part II of this book provides thorough coverage of these new features showing both how you write CLR-based database objects as well as how you incorporate them into the database and where they are best utilized. Additionally, the chapters in Part II will go on to cover the new SQL Notification Services, the SQL Broker Service and the improved XML integration features.

Part III hits the last big area of enhancements found in Microsoft SQL Server 2005. In Part III you can learn about the new Business Intelligence (BI) features. The BI area for SQL Server 2005 has some of the richest new features found in the new release. For instance, with SQL Server 2005, the new SQL Service Reporting Services feature is included as an integral part of the base SQL Server package and one of the chapters in this section will guide you through the use of its graphical report designer as well as exploring SQL Server Reporting Service’s rich report formatting and deployment features. Integration Services, the replacement for Data Transformation Services (DTS) has also been totally revamped in SQL Server 2005. First introduced with SQL Server 7, DTS has become a cornerstone of both the data warehousing extraction-transformation-load (ETL) function as well as the primary vehicle for moving data between SQL Server and other platforms. With the SQL Server 2005 release Integration Services has been rewritten from the ground up all in managed code and one of the chapters in Part III goes into to detail about the new changes that you’ll find in the new Integration Services. If that weren’t enough, Part III will also introduce you the new feature found in SQL Server’s Analysis Services and data mining features.

As you can see there’s a lot to cover and the SQL Server 2005 has more new features that any previous release of SQL Server.