Next Yukon, Whidbey Betas Due In May, Microsoft Says

SQL Server executives gave partners a look under the hood of its Yukon" database at Momentum here, as well as some time lines for its next generation database and Visual Studio development platform.

Yukon Beta 2 and Whidbey Beta 1 will be targeted for release in May for corporate developers and application architects, said Don Petersen, a SQL Server product manager.

Further out, Phase III testing, which will involve the release of Yukon Beta 3 and Whidbey Beta 2, is planned for August 2004, he said.

Phase III testing will be expanded to solution providers and systems integrators and will involve Microsoft's field force more aggressively, said Don Petersen, a SQL Server product manager.

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Yukon beta 3 is also referred to as the first release candidate. The milestone dates for Yukon and Whidbey were displayed on screen as part of the presentation Friday afternoon.

Scheduling for Yukon and whidbey are tightly interrelated since Microsoft plans deep .NET integration into Yukon, including a new SQL Server Common Language Run-Time (CLR) extensibility model and support for native XML data and schemata. The CLR is the design engine that powers Microsoft's Visual Studio development platform.

Yukon will also feature eight-node clustering, new asynchronous service broker for passing messages between databases, enhanced security, unified development tools, a business intelligence workbench, data analysis and data transformation service, online indexing, proactive caching and database mirroring, Petersen said.

While attendees of the company's Professional Developers Conference later this month will get their hands on some early beta "bits" of both Yukon and Whidbey, executives here said, mainstream testing won't begin until next spring.

One solution provider at the Yukon briefing said the enhanced security and failover features will be of great use.

"There are so many new features, but security is always important," said Benedikt Svavarsson, services manager at EJS, a systems integrator in Reykjavik, Iceland. "The database mirrowing is pretty cool. If one database server goes down, you can redirect it to another. It's important because downtime is expensive."