SQL Server Pros Gather For Database Road Map

Professional Association of SQL Server members will hear that Service Pack 3 for the current SQL Server 2000 is slated to ship by year's end, and the final version of the 64-bit version of the database is due to ship in April in tandem with the delayed Windows .Net Server 2003 operating system, Microsoft said. Beta versions of both are already available. (See related story.)

But perhaps most importantly, Microsoft will reiterate plans to have a beta for Yukon, the next major release of SQL Server, out in the first half of next year, with a final version due by year's end.

As usual, all these dates are subject to change.

SQL Server has been a success story for Microsoft starting with SQL Server 7, and has gained momentum with the current release, analysts said. Last year, IDC numbers showed SQL Server market share growing faster than any other database.

Microsoft will use the meeting to recap SQL Server's 10-year life span, at least in Windows. Technically, it was available on OS/2 before 1992. Gordon Mangione, vice president of SQL Server, will keynote Wednesday.

"One major pillar of Yukon will be all the 'abilities', scalability, availability and manageability," said Product Manager Sheryl Tullis.

Another theme is developer productivity via integration with Visual Studio and Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR). "Our support for that means there will be a consistent [development environment, folks who know Visual Studio will be able to develop for SQL Server," Tullis said.

Finally, the company will stress business intelligence by embedding more data warehousing and data mining algorithms into the database itself, Tullis said.

The conference, expected to draw 1,500 attendees, lasts through Friday.

In other database news, IBM is slated to ship its DB2 Version 8.1 this Thursday. IBM has said the new version will add more auto-tuning and self-healing features.