Here is some stuff I learnt yesterday evening’s SQL Server 2005 New Features session at Microsoft in Reading

Enterprise Manager

  • Enterprise Manager has been re-hashed, and re-named Management Studio.
  • It didn’t seem radically different in terms of what it does.
  • It will work with previous versions
  • Unlike Oracle’s offering, it isn’t browser based

Osql - Now called sqlcmd

  • It has definitely been much improved.
  • There are a lot of command line switches.
  • You can now pass in parameters from the command line. Like Oracle
  • I’d be interested to see it would work with sql 2000. And sybase

Security

  • The bloke said that S2K had been ’re-architected' - I couldn’t really see this at all
  • The concept of schemas (or schema owners) has been separated out from that of users. I think in practice this just means you have a ‘special’ type of user for owning the objects.
  • There is supposed to be better levels of encryption.
  • SAC - see below

Surface Area Configuration

  • Embodies concept of trying to reduce the ‘surface area’ of the database i.e. the amount of stuff you’ve got installed
  • There’s a specific GUI to control this, and (interestingly) a very full-featured command line option

Other

  • There’s a database mail tool. I couldn’t see much advantage to this other than not having to install the Outlook client
  • There’s a concept of database snapshots. You ‘take’ a snapshot of all the data, then can optionally go back to it in an Oracle-flashback way
  • Due to changes in the licensing laws, they no longer give out free beer