Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Microsoft, microsoft.com
EXCELLENT 9.1
Manageability (25%) 9 9
Performance (25%) 9 9
Availability (20%) 9 9
Scalability (20%) 9 9
Value (10%) 10
10
CoSt: Standard Edition starts at $5,999 per
processor or $1,849 with 5 CALs. Enterprise Edi-
tion starts at $24,999 per processor or $13,969
with 25 CALs.
platFormS: Windows Server 2003
Bottom lIne: SQL Server 2005 vastly improves
capabilities on all fronts, including develop-
ment, integration, management, and BI. Com-
panies will be able to run safer databases,
better manage their environment, and finally
create a truly 24/7 operation. Among new
high-availability features, partial restores will
allow databases to be brought online faster
after failures, and database mirroring, al-
though not yet officially supported, will provide
automatic fail-over for log shipping scenarios.

26 I N F OWO R L D . C O M 01.16.06
 SQL Server
Bulks Up
Microsoft’s makeover brings high-availability,
disaster recovery, and other heavy-duty improvements
to its heavyweight DBMS
T
o call SQL server 2000 a
T
90-pound weakling because it
lacks certain high-end features
is a bit like calling Hercules a wimp be-
cause he never ran a marathon. Not ev-
ery strongman can perform every feat,
and not every company needs every
heavyweight feature. Many enterprises,
large and small, have been running their
businesses on SQL Server for years.
BY SEAN MCCOWN Still, there’s no denying that SQL
Server always fell short of Oracle Da-
ILLUSTRATION BY BILL MAYER tabase when it came to true enter-
prise features, especially in the areas
of high-availability and disaster recov-
ery. Whereas Oracle met the demands
of mission-critical, 24/7 operation with
features such as online re-indexing,
snapshot-based restores, and fail-over
log shipping, SQL Server couldn’t pro-
vide true zero-percent data loss with-
out the help of third-party solutions.
For customers who didn’t need these
protections, SQL Server offered a solid
database with lower licensing fees. But
maintenance-related downtime was a
fact of life.
Until now. More than five years in
the re-making, SQL Server 2005 not
only addresses shortcomings in high-
availability and disaster recovery, but
brings sweeping improvements in
almost every area. Management tasks
have been streamlined, and monitoring
and diagnostics have been beefed up.
A default locked-down configuration,
data encryption, and other new features
strengthen security. Analysis Services,
Reporting Services, and Data Mining are
now fully integrated and mature. DTS
(Data Transformation Services) has been
rewritten from the ground up, emerging
as the more powerful and flexible SQL
SSIS (Server Integration Services). Inte-
gration with Visual Studio and the .Net/
CLR opens SQL Server internals to .Net
developers and .Net to SQL developers,
meaning the power of .Net can now be
tapped for stored procedures, data flows
and transformations, BI applications,
and more (see the online-only sidebar,
“Taking the database beyond SQL,” at
infoworld.com/3787).
SQL Server 2005 also promises bet-
ter performance. I didn’t run perfor-
mance benchmarks for this review,
but in addition to allowing DBAs to
partition the database to balance load,
Microsoft has worked hard to improve
memory management, indexing strat-
egies, and query optimization. Users
will see the difference.
I N F OWO R L D . C O M 01.16.06 27
 Many of the changes in SQL ration and the package will run on
Server 2005 will take current SQL the new server.
developers and DBAs some time Last but not least, the new .Net
to learn. One key high-availabil- integration releases SSIS from
ity feature, database mirroring, is DTS’s dependence on the limits of
for practical purposes still “beta.” SSIS’s new control-flow containers, which allow you to VBscript and moves serious coders
Microsoft still has work to do, es- group operations and execute them in sequence, go far into the richness of VB.net. For this
pecially in integrating and refining beyond the capabilities of DTS. reason, file and string manipula-
SQL Server’s many tools. Micro- tions, math operations, and Win32
soft’s extreme makeover closes the calls are much easier and faster.
gap between SQL Server and Oracle, SSIS Snapshot As you would expect, the increased
however, and makes SQL Server a true Sweeping changes in the integration toolset power and flexibility of SSIS come at
contender even for very large databas- present a welcome challenge to DBAs. the price of increased complexity. SSIS
es and the most demanding enterprise pros presents a learning curve that can
environments. bNew modeling paradigm, flow control seem daunting, but after you learn how
containers, and .Net integration extend to use it, SSIS will change the way your
A New Way to Move Your Data functionality company thinks about its data. Systems
SSIS, the revamped set of tools for bPackages are easy to write, store, and that couldn’t communicate before are
moving and manipulating data, not deploy now perfectly integrated and have the
only provides greatly enhanced per- bComplicated operations perform much full power of .Net behind them. Com-
formance, reliability, and functional- faster than ever before plex data load operations into ware-
ity over DTS, but also offers many new Cons houses and disparate systems will take
prebuilt tasks that reduce the amount bMore complex toolset has quirks that a fraction of the time to build, execute,
of coding needed to perform the most make it difficult to learn and support. Other complicated tasks
common operations, including back- bNot integrated with Management Studio can also be performed much faster,
ing up databases, re-indexing tables, which means deadlines will be met
and running integrity checks. More more easily and projects won’t be held
important, SSIS completely changes ing, these are natively supported in up because of the limited functionality
the modeling paradigm that DTS uses, SSIS, meaning you can run data-min- of DTS and the way operations have to
logically dividing its building blocks ing queries, work with slowly chang- be taped together.
into separate control-flow and data- ing dimensions, and send the data
flow components. wherever you like, even to Reporting Maximum DBA
Control-flow containers are graphi- Services reports. In fact, SSIS serves as Microsoft has also made some dramat-
cal representations of operations that a bridge between SSAS and SSRS and ic changes to its management tools, re-
would otherwise take developers doz- any ODBC-compliant data source. placing Enterprise Manager and Query
ens of lines of code and many hours Package configurations are another Analyzer with the new SSMS (SQL
of debugging to create. Some of the huge enhancement. These allow you Server Management Studio). SSMS
operations you can perform with the to define certain elements of the pack- serves as both the database command
new containers (namely Sequence, age — file locations, database con- line, with which you perform tasks
For Loop, and Foreach) can’t even be nections, special log-ins, etc. — to be such as creating databases and manag-
done in DTS or would be too difficult read in from an external source (like ing user accounts, and the tool used to
to manage. an XML file) and applied at run time. write database code. SSIS and Profiler
SSIS also extends the reach into dif- This function lets you deploy packages were left out of this merger.
ferent platforms, and not just different very quickly because you don’t have to These changes won’t leave users
databases. For example, whereas DTS change them to move them from one completely satisfied. For starters, doing
provided limited visibility into OLAP system to another; you simply change normal query tasks, such as viewing ex-
and practically none into data min- the dynamic elements in the configu- ecution plans and just running queries,

30 I N F OWO R L D . C O M 01.16.06
is much slower. Screens can be- you can’t change the layouts of
come quite unresponsive while the canned reports, nor can you
queries run, and it takes much add your own reports or set up
longer to pull up execution subscriptions, as you normally
plans, sometimes causing the can in SSRS. You can manually
window to seize up. Microsoft Management Studio, which unifies OLTP and OLAP management export the reports to Excel or
also changed the layout of the and development, uses Reporting Services to provide detailed PDF, however.
execution plans, so larger ones reports on the database. One key design goal for SQL
are much harder to read. Your Server 2005 was tighter security
favorite keyboard shortcuts have been out of the box. To reduce the surface
taken away, and right-clicking on a view management Snapshot area for attacks, the most dangerous
— which used to allow you to edit it — Dramatic changes to management tools features are disabled until the DBA
now takes you directly to query builder. won’t leave users completely satisfied. turns them on. This is a help, but not
A lot of DBAs won’t like this. pros earth-shattering to experienced DBAs,
But these annoyances are greatly b Mirroring, improved replication, online who mostly have their lockdown scripts
outweighed by richer management restores, and other features boost written and don’t find it much trouble
capabilities overall. One place Micro- availability and speed disaster recovery to run them on install. The truly signif-
soft has succeeded beyond expecta- b Dynamic Management Views and icant security improvements revolve
tions is in the management of SQL monitoring improvements provide around password management and
error logs. SSMS not only displays the greater visibility into database operations rights assignment. Native SQL pass-
SQL error logs, but combines them b Security improvements include sup- words can now be set to respect Win-
with the Windows NT event logs in the port for Windows password policies, dows password policies, which means
same pane, allowing DBAs to see all more control over schema changes, and that you can require your SQL pass-
the relevant information in one place. native encryption words to have the same password
While we’re on the topic of combined Cons strength, expiration, history, lockout
logs, this is a good place to mention the b
Management Studio suffers from threshold, lockout duration, and age
enhancements to Profiler, which now performance and stability issues policies as your Windows accounts.
combines SQL trace logs with Perfmon bProfiler not merged with SSMS You can even require the user to change
logs. This makes it much easier to cor- bMirroring not yet officially supported the password at the next log in. Other
relate performance counters with important security enhancements
specific queries. In fact, it’s very easy include more control over schema
to find exactly what you’re looking for server stats, security, and on and on. So changes (discussed under coding en-
because all you have to do is click on many things you couldn’t see at all be- hancements below) and the capability
the performance spike in the Perfmon fore are now at your fingertips. to encrypt data at the column level.
log and it automatically takes you to In addition, DBAs get ready-made SQL Server 2005 also brings some
the relevant place in the Profiler log. reports on detailed database and exciting new features for increasing
At the heart of SQL’s new man- server stats, including schema chang- availability and smoothing disaster
agement capabilities are the DMVs es, memory and index usage, resource recovery. In the area of HA (high avail-
(Dynamic Management Views) and consumption, blocking, and many ability), Microsoft has introduced
functions, which give admins much others. SSMS relies on SSRS for this database mirroring and made some
deeper insight into database opera- functionality, and I find that it some- important changes to replication. Now
tions. Microsoft used to hide the deep- times bogs down when bringing up a schema changes will be replicated au-
er aspects of the database, but meeting report on a busy server, or on a large tomatically to the subscribers; no lon-
the demands of managing large data- database with a lot of objects. I’m also ger must the DBA run code by hand
bases means giving DBAs more con- a little disappointed that Microsoft to do it. Snapshots no longer need
trol. DMVs provide greater visibility didn’t provide the RDL (Report Defi- to be restarted after failures, but will
into memory, index usage, table stats, nition Language) code. As a result, automatically resume after network

I N F OWO R L D . C O M 01.16.06 31

errors or other glitches, allowing you
to get your HA scenario up and run-
ning much faster. Also, logical record
replication, which allows you to define
parent and child data that will either
be replicated together or not at all,
ensures more consistent HA scenarios
and eliminates logical errors on the
subscriber side.
Mirroring allows you to specify a
database on another server to be kept
in synch with a primary database. Do-
ing this allows you to automatically fail
over to the mirror server should the
primary fail, providing SQL Server’s
first zero data loss HA scenario. This
configuration can be expensive to ap-
plications and networks, so you’ll need
to test it thoroughly, but the capability
is finally here. Note, however, that mir-
roring doesn’t yet qualify as a produc-
tion feature in this release. Microsoft
is shipping SQL Server 2005 with mir-
roring turned off, and the feature is
unsupported.
Mirroring performed solidly in my
tests, handling fail-overs of a 100GB
database without a hitch. The moni-
toring around mirroring, however, is
still very primitive, consisting of only
a small number of DMVs and perfor-
mance counters, so it’s not especially
easy to find out how much data has
been replicated, how far behind the
secondary system is from the primary,
or the cost of the replication. The dif-
ficulty in gaining visibility into the pro-
cess may fray some nerves.
As for disaster recovery, SQL Server
2005 slashes the downtime necessary
when restoring a backup. The new
online restore capability allows users
to begin working in the database as
objects become available. With SQL
Server 2000, the entire database must
be restored before it can be made avail-
able to users. Given the time it takes to
32 I N F OWO R L D . C O M 01.16.06
completely restore a multi-terabyte da-
tabase, online restores could mean the
difference between operating produc-
tively and being crippled for hours.
Similarly, you can now fix database
corruption with less impact on users.
Page-level restore allows you to restore
a single corrupted page without hin-
dering the availability of the rest of the
database.
Developing for a New Age
Code enhancements can be divid-
ed into two basic categories: those
for developers and those for DBAs.
Apart from the .Net/CLR integration,
CTEs (Common Table Expressions)
are arguably the most significant for
developers. Besides elegantly solving
the problem of recursive queries, which
I won’t get into, CTEs allow developers
to simplify code by using inline query
definitions in place of views or derived
tables. CTEs not only streamline com-
plex queries, but perform the same as
derived tables, so there isn’t any extra
overhead to implementing them.
Another important enhancement:
The TOP clause, which allows you to
define that only a certain number of
a result set is returned (such as the
top 10 salespeople by revenue in the
United States), can now take a param-
eter as an argument. I know it doesn’t
sound like much, but this is one of
those cases where a relatively small
change can make a huge difference in
development effort. In short, instead of
having to include a static value (TOP
10, for example) in the code, you can
now include a variable, allowing users
to report the TOP 10 or TOP 100 (or any
number they like) on the fly.
Other goodies for developers include
ranking, random data sampling, pivot/
unpivot, synonyms, much richer error
handling, and code security context
development Snapshot
New tools and constructs give developers
more power without much pain.
pros
CLR integration allows developers to tap
b
.Net languages for stored procedures and
SSIS packages
New T-SQL constructs and improve-
b
ments to old ones extend power while
simplifying coding
Native XML storage allows developers to
b
combine the power of XML documents
and relational data
Cons
Management Studio lacks important
b
code editing features such as IntelliSense
Unresponsive interface makes
b
Management Studio an inefficient tool
for running a lot of complex queries
Some DMVs require longer and more
b
complex queries than their deprecated
counterparts
(see “Cool Tools for SQL Coders,” pg. 33).
Many developers will also be singing in
their Cheerios over SQL Server 2005’s
native XML storage capabilities. As I
mentioned in my April 2004 compari-
son of the leading relational databases’
XML handling capabilities (infoworld.
com/2318), SQL Server 2000 was lim-
ited to “shredding” XML into relational
data, a cumbersome process that fails
to preserve XML hierarchies. Now, you
can import XML into a column and not
only perform native XML queries, but
also index it for fast retrieval.
DBAs haven’t been left out of the
coding revolution. A number of cod-
ing changes give admins management
capabilities from the command line
that are not accessible through Man-
agement Studio. One in particular,
DDL (Data Definition Language), will
not only change the way DBAs do their
jobs but will also help their CEOs sleep
much better at night. DDL triggers fire
whenever changes to the database
schema occur, and they can be defined
on pretty much any object type in the
server or database, helping to make
 Cool Tools for SQL Coders
A number of code enhancements in SQL Server 2005 bring greater functionality and ease to developers.

Common Table Expressions You can simplify code by using an inline query definition in place of views or derived tables.
unwanted changes a Dynamic TOP You can use parameters (no longer just static values) as arguments in TOP clauses.
thing of the past.
Pivot/Unpivot You can shift the rows of a table to columns and back again.
Indexing is always
a volatile subject in Ranking You can all sequence information to your data sets.
any busy production Random data sampling You can take samples of large tables to get an idea of data distribution.
environment. DBAs Synonyms You can rename objects with friendlier names.
need to maintain Code security context You can run code as a specified user no matter who calls it.
the database; pro- OUTPUT clause You can see what changes have been made during Delete and Update operations.
duction managers
.WRITE on Update You can perform chunked updates in large text objects without dealing with pointers.
don’t want to inter-
rupt operations. On- APPLY join operator You can apply results of a user-defined function at the column level.
line indexing allows INTERSECT and EXCEPT Similar to UNION, these allow you to find rows that result sets have in common or in difference.
DBAs to create or
rebuild indexes without taking the da- you and these sources and shows you achieved its goal to bring data mining
tabase offline. The index is built in par- the view of the data you request. UDM into the hands of nonprofessionals, but
allel to the table and then applied once brings several important changes to it is far easier than using the third-par-
it is created. Of course, you have to be the way you will operate with SSAS. ty mining tools.
aware of resources, but this feature will One is that now you can have multiple Tying the BI package together is
greatly increase availability for shops fact tables, and in fact, you have your SSRS. With this new release, Micro-
that have to be up 24/7. DBAs can now entire relational schema available to soft has taken away much of the pain
also control the level of locking used by you. UDM eliminates the need for vir- of writing and distributing reports.
indexing operations. tual cubes and virtual dimensions, pro- Perhaps the most important improve-
viding not only increased functionality ment, Report Builder, is a new Web
Not Your Father’s OLAP but a much easier model with which interface that allows end-users to
SQL Server 2005’s suite of BI tools to work. write and publish their own reports.
includes SSAS (SQL Server Analysis One of my absolute favorite new Admins publish a report model, which
Services), SSDM (SQL Server Data Min- features is proactive caching. This is basically a definition of the data they
ing), and SSRS (SQL Server Reporting mechanism allows you to set up met- want the users to be able to write re-
Services), all of which are finally de- rics that determine when your data ports against, and users step through
signed to work together to answer your gets refreshed. There are several ways the wizard interface to create what-
intelligence needs. SSAS is looking to do this, but one of the better ones ever reports they like. In a way, these
pretty good these days, thanks to many is to define your cube to be refreshed reports can be richer than tradition-
usability enhancements. The new Busi- when the base data changes. The data al SSRS reports because they come
ness Intelligence Wizard comes loaded is refreshed at the partition level, and with infinite drilldown already built
with pre-canned solutions to common there are many options for balancing in, which is something that designed
problems. Currency conversions, semi- performance and latency. reports simply don’t have.
additive measures, and time-based SQL Server Data Mining has grown Report Builder’s controls allow
calculations are just some of the situa- from what seemed like an experiment developers to embed reports in
tions that the wizard handles. into a full-fledged application. Where- applications. Along with this desirable
SSAS has had one very important as SQL Server 2000 had two mining capability, Report Builder also includes
structural change — the UDM (Unified algorithms — simple clustering and support for custom controls that allow
Dimensional Model). It’s hard to fully simple decision trees — SQL Server developers (most likely third-party
grasp the UDM until you work with 2005 has 10. It also has 25 new visual- vendors) to extend SSRS functionality.
it, but it basically provides a bridge izations and visual query editors. All of SSRS also includes lesser
between clients such as Excel to any these tools make it much easier to de- enhancements that end-users will
number of heterogeneous data sources. velop and work with mining models. I find helpful. One of these is multi-
Or put in simpler terms, it sits between wouldn’t say that Microsoft has exactly valued parameters, which allow us-

I N F OWO R L D . C O M 01.16.06 33
 ers to pass more than one need true 24/7 availability, rely
value (multiple sales regions, heavily on DTS, or need to com-
for example) inside a single ply with Sarbanes-Oxley audits.
parameter. This functionality If you’re at the point where
previously relied on passing in you just can’t keep pulling
delimited elements into a single Analysis Services, which now taps Visual Studio for development, downtime for maintenance, or
parameter, and then parsing sports a cleaner interface that will speed development of report- for any other reason, then this
them out into single entities ing and business intelligence applications. upgrade shouldn’t wait. SQL
in the database. Other nice Server 2005’s replication en-
additions are interactive sorting, hancements, online reindexing, partial
which allows users to change the sort- Business intelligence restores, and (soon) database mirror-
ing criteria of the columns in their re- Snapshot ing will offer welcome relief.
ports as they see fit, and a calendar Analysis Services, Data Mining, and If you are currently pushing DTS to
picker, which allows users to choose a Reporting Services are finally designed to the limit, converting to SSIS will ulti-
date from a pop-up calendar instead work together. mately streamline operations but may
of having to type it. pros not be as easy as you’d like. Proper
For developers, SSRS works directly b New Unified Dimensional Model makes planning will be essential. The best
with SSAS and SSIS, using them both Analysis Services a bridge to any number way to go about it is to put a dedicated
as data sources. This is a huge step for- of heterogeneous data sources SSIS server in place and upgrade your
ward because current SSRS users can b Data mining matures with richer set of packages one at a time. This method
follow processes already in place to mining algorithms and visualizations will give you an opportunity to upgrade
produce any number of reports in any b Reporting Services now allows end-users and test at your leisure.
number of ways. The SSIS integration to create their own reports and develop- If you’re concerned about compli-
alone gives you the capability to pull ers to embed reports in applications ance, the new security features and the
in data from multiple sources, includ- bComplex cubes perform well and reliably DDL triggers will whip your database
ing those merged from different data- cons into shape very quickly. Here again,
bases, Web services, RSS feeds, SSAS, b Management Studio supports writing of though, implementing password
and data-mining repositories. The pos- BI code but not reports policies can cause some grief in your
sibilities are limitless. The new interface presents a slight learn-
b environment, so you’ll have to plan
ing curve, especially for advanced features appropriately.
Wish List For shops without these pressing
What got left out of this release? Many problems, SQL Server 2005 offers plen-
developers and DBAs were looking SQL DBAs have grown to live with and ty of other reasons to consider it. From
forward to IntelliSense for T-SQL cod- work around. Finally, Microsoft still management to development, just pick
ing. Many were also hoping for some hasn’t offered an answer to Oracle’s your woe and chances are SQL Server
sort of centralized code repository. grid solution, which allows you to clus- 2005 will help alleviate it.
We’ve still got templates, but those ter multiple database servers for load SQL Server 2005 is an excellent
typically reside on clients; DBAs and balancing and fail-over and manage release that will gain Microsoft some
developers can’t easily pull them from them as a group. That’s the last major real respect in the high-end database
a centralized online resource. SSIS is advantage Oracle can still claim over market. SQL Server’s tools now lead
a huge improvement over DTS, but it SQL Server. Oracle and DB2 in pretty much every
still isn’t an actual ETL server, meaning Who should upgrade and when? area — management, monitoring, and
it still uses the resources of the server Shops who should look at an upgrade especially development — and of the
that kicks off the package. This has right away — assuming their applica- three vendors, Microsoft seems to be
been a source of grief for many DBAs, tions have been certified for the new the most concerned about improving
although the current architecture has version and migrating won’t void their them. Maybe those other guys should
advantages too, and it’s something support contracts — are those that start hitting the weights. i

34 I N F OWO R L D . C O M 01.16.06