Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP2

REVIEW DATE: 03.26.02

Product: Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP2

Price: $19,999 list per CPU
Company Info: Microsoft Corp., 800-426-9400, www.microsoft.com/sql

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With best-in-class ease of use on the Windows platform, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP2
combines strong administration abilities with leading-edge XML support. Though it's still
Windows-centric, Microsoft's database can connect to data from a variety of data sources. It
performed impressively on our ASP Nile Throughput test but was bottom-of-the- heap on the JSP
Nile Throughput test.
SQL Server was the first industrial-strength database that didn't require a black belt in DBA
expertise. The trend continues in this version of SQL Server with the Enterprise Manager console
the hands-down ease-of-use leader among the products we evaluated.
We tested SQL Server, with SP2 installed, on Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Unlike DB2,
Oracle9i, and Sybase ASE, SQL Server relies on Windows for clustering. The Enterprise
Manager has a graphical interface and plenty of wizards for common tasks; it also lets you
manage many servers fairly easily through OLE DB, including linked servers and non-SQL Server
data sources.
With the Enterprise Manager, we easily defined tables, created users, and set table and column
permissions graphically. The backup wizard makes scheduling database backups a snap. We
also liked the ability to set up replicated databases quickly with support for snapshot and
transaction-based replication. Our sample orders were processed in one database and
automatically updated in a second instance, for an instant archive.
The SQL Query Analyzer is the most polished and functional tool we saw for tuning manual SQL
queries. It conveniently displays results in either grid or text format and can interrupt long-running
queries. We liked its easy-to-view execution plans for SQL queries. In our testing, the indextuning wizard suggested an index based on subject names to optimize queries for our Web
bookstore. The tool then built the index for us based on automated calculations. This illustrates
just one way that SQL Server self-tunes where other platforms require manual tweaks.
Earlier versions of SQL Server put OLAP into the reach of organizations that lacked huge
budgets. Analysis services wizards let you build and create data cubes, which can generate
dimensions and fact tables. The wizards' reporting connects with Excel PivotTables, so you can
view different dimensions to analyze sales trends, for example. Though you'd still benefit from
data-warehousing expertise, SQL Server's OLAP capabilities are the simplest to use of all those
we tested. Their natural-language query processing puts analysis into the hands of ordinary
users. SQL Server offers data mining, but Oracle9i has more algorithms.
For XML support, SQL Server users can download the free SQLXML 2.0 add-on package. By

default, this add-on supports bulk-additions of XML data into records and can return queries in
XML. It also offers Updategrams, which can change data using XML action queries. We
successfully used this feature to do a bulk import of several hundred orders.
For database developers, the new .NET Framework classes may offer the fastest and most
flexible access to SQL Server databases. We used the dedicated ADO .NET classes for SQL
Server for a supplemental .NET version of our performance test (written in C#). For those working
in J2EE-based Web environments, after years of relying on third parties, Microsoft is now making
available a free, downloadable Type-4 JDBC driver, which we used for our JSP Nile Throughput
test.
Microsoft plans to announce a SQL server Web services toolkit for exposing stored procedures
easily in .NET applications built in Visual Studio.NET. Microsoft Data Transformation Services
currently let developers move data programmatically from one source to another as well as store
and leverage metadata across systems and projects.
The future for SQL Server will undoubtedly include more integration with .NET. Today you still
write business logic in stored procedures using Microsoft's Transact-SQL (T-SQL). The .NET
vision will put business logic into separate components in a variety of programming languages.
The included SQL Analyzer tool has an excellent set of templates for many kinds of T-SQL stored
procedures, but SQL Server includes no Java support.
This DBMS does a good job of reaching out to databases on Unix and other platforms, but there's
no getting around its reliance on Windows.

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