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Microsoft Reaches SQL Server Milestones

Microsoft made several milestone announcements regarding its database products Wednesday at its SQL PASS conference in Seattle.

Among those milestones, the company released a community technology preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2. SP2   will provide support for data compression, additional business intelligence capabilities, and security updates relating to Common Criteria. It also includes manageability enhancements, as well as support for Windows Vista and Office 2007. The CTP for SQL Server 2005 SP2 is available here.

Additionally, the company announced it has set November 30 as the release to manufacturing (RTM) date for Visual Studio Team System for Database Professionals, which the company oddly refers to as DataDude. The package will provide change management, development, testing and deployment of databases through Visual Studio's toolset. More information regarding DataDude is available here.

Meanwhile, Microsoft also delivered the release candidate (RC) of SQL Server Compact Edition or SQLce. The RC stage is the last phase of testing before the code is RTMed. If the naming conventions for the product seem a little confused, they are. The previous release of the product was named SQL Server Mobile Edition.

However, the company's marketeers dropped that name in favor of calling it SQL Server Everywhere Edition, because they wanted to de-emphasize the idea that it was only for mobile devices after it released licensing restrictions that kept the database from being run on PCs. But last month, Microsoft abruptly dropped that name, apparently because it was deemed too similar to the leading database in that market – Sybase's SQL Anywhere. Still, calling it SQLce seems likely to confuse customers as well because Microsoft's longstanding mobile and embedded device operating system is named Windows CE.

About the Author

Stuart J. Johnston has covered technology, especially Microsoft, since February 1988 for InfoWorld, Computerworld, Information Week, and PC World, as well as for Enterprise Developer, XML & Web Services, and .NET magazines.

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