Overview

SQL Server 2005 is a comprehensive database platform providing enterprise-class data management with integrated business intelligence (BI) tools. The SQL Server 2005 database engine provides more secure, reliable storage for both relational and structured data, enabling you to build and manage highly available, performant data applications for use in your business. Microsoft has redesigned the SQL Server 2005 product family to better meet the needs of specific customer segments by introducing four new editions: Express, Workgroup, Standard, and Enterprise.

These new editions offer a range of features—from high availability and scalability to advanced business intelligence tools—designed to empower users across an organization. As a low-cost mainstream database, SQL Server 2005 delivers unprecedented value and functionality compared with competitive solutions. For demanding enterprise systems, SQL Server 2005 represents a dramatic step forward, with reduced application downtime, and high scalability and performance, and tight security-related controls. SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition scales to the performance levels required to support enterprise online transaction processing (OLTP), highly complex data analysis, data warehousing systems, and Web sites. With comprehensive business intelligence, robust analytics capabilities and high-availability features such as failover clustering and database mirroring, SQL Server Enterprise can handle the most critical enterprise workloads.

Main Features

• Extend log shipping capabilities with the database mirroring solution. You will be able to use database mirroring to enhance availability of your SQL Server systems by setting up automatic failover to a standby server.
• With SQL Server 2005, database administrators are able to perform a restore operation while an instance of SQL Server is running. Online restore improves the availability of SQL Server because only the data being restored is unavailable; the rest of the database remains online and available.
• The online index option allows concurrent modifications (updates, deletes, and inserts) to the underlying table or clustered index data and any associated indexes during index data definition language (DDL) execution. For example, while a clustered index is being rebuilt, you can continue to make updates to the underlying data and perform queries against the data.
• Service Broker is a robust messaging infrastructure that provides reliable transactional delivery of critical messages between servers—with the scalable high-performance that is expected with asynchronous queuing.
• With SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services moves into the realm of real- time analytics. From scalability enhancements to deep integration with Microsoft Office, SQL Server 2005 helps extend business intelligence to every level of your business.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) provide businesses with the capability to define graphic, customizable business metrics to help generate and track key corporate benchmarks.
• Report Builder is a component of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services that enables business users to create and deploy reports with a user-friendly enterprise data model.
• SQL Server 2005 supports rich, full-text search applications. Cataloging capabilities provide greater flexibility over what is cataloged. Query performance and scalability have been improved dramatically, and new management tools provide greater insight into the full-text implementation.
• With SQL Server 2005 developers can develop Web services in the database tier, making SQL Server a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) listener and providing a new type of data access capability for Web services-centric applications.

System Requirements

• Hard Disk
  

  1 gigabyte (GB) or more recommended.

  
  
• Memory
  

  350 MB of available hard-disk space for the recommended installation.

  
  
• Processor
  Intel Pentium III Processor.
  
  
• Platform
  

  Microsoft Windows 2000 Server with Service Pack (SP) 4 or later.