Partners To Get Up Close And Personal To Yukon Next Week

Microsoft next week plans to give a bevy of close partners, customers and ISVs an in-depth look at Yukon, its next-generation database, the company confirmed Friday.

Attendees of the sneak preview will get a detailed tour but will not leave with beta code in hand, company sources said.

A spokeswoman reiterated Microsoft's plan to ship beta one of the technology in the first half of 2003. At least one product team member got more specific last month when he told Mark Shainman, an analyst at Meta Group, that the vendor's goal was to get beta software out to 1,500 partners and customers in February or March.(See story.)

Yukon is the long-anticipated follow-on to SQL Server 2000 that will add support for Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR) environment. That support will enable partners with experience in C or Cobol or other supported languages to tap into back-end SQL Server databases and functions even if they're not fluent in SQL.

A Microsoft source told CRN that Yukon beta plans remain "somewhat in flux." That is understandable given the recent SQL Slammer worm that hit the Internet in late January, taking advantage of a buffer-overflow flaw in the current database. SQL Slammer, also known as Sapphire, brought many Web sites to their knees in late January and earlier this month.

Even though a patch for that flaw had been available since last summer, the Microsoft source said the difficulty in applying the fix made it understandable that companies held off.

"They knew [the fix] would be in [Service Pack] 3, so they waited," he said. Service Pack 3 was available the week before the Slammer wrought havoc, but many companies did not have the time to test and apply it.

"The simple truth is, 'Yes, the patches were available' and 'Yes, we made them too difficult to apply,' " he said.

In other news, the 64-bit version of SQL Server 2000, not-so-snappily-named SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition (64-bit), is slated to debut April 24 along with Windows 2003 Server in San Francisco. (See story.)