Microsoft is finally talking an itty-bit more about "SQL Server Next," aka Katmai.

As expected, Katmai will be a key focus at the company's first Business Intelligence Summit kicking off today in Redmond, Wash.

In a posting the company says Katmai is due next year (2008), which was pretty evident anyway, given its insistence that it will ship major new releases every 36 months or so. SQL Server 2005 shipped in the fall of that year.

The big deal around Katmai--besides the mystery--is tighter links to Office 2007; better and easier to cfreate reports that can be shared externally; support for many data types.

Oh, yeah, and it'll provide "an integrated development environment with Visual Studio and .NET Framework that will accelerate development of new applicaitons with a higher level of data extraction." Phew.

Microsoft execs in the past few weeks have warned enterprise partners that the Longhorn Windows Server release might be held up "slightly" in order to sync up to Katmai and Orcas (Visual Studio Next) release. The goal there would be to roll out a single "platform release."

Reaction to that idea has been mixed but that's what trial balloons are for. It'll be interesting to see what happens there.

Here's the official Katmai web site.

Now all people need is actual code. Cough. Jeff Raikes will likely talk more on Katmai later today and Ted Kummert will expand on it tomorrow. Maybe someone will announce beta?

Stay tuned.