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SQL Server June 2005 CTP Available
Microsoft VP Flessner announces launch schedule for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005, as well as first public SQL Server 2005 CTP.
by Jim Minatel

Tech•Ed, June 7, 2005

Paul Flessner Senior VP for Server Applications, Microsoft

Microsoft Senior Vice President for Server Applications Paul Flessner finally gave an official public launch date for the long-awaited SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 products in his second-day keynote address to Microsoft Tech•Ed attendees in Orlando. After explaining that SQL Server 2005 is running Microsoft's own top 10 internal database applications, and that five of those database applications contain more than a terabyte of data each, he set the week of November 7 as the launch date for both SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005.

Additionally, he announced that BizTalk Server 2006 will launch that same week. Flessner also announced that the most recent SQL Server 2005 preview version—the June Community Technical Preview (CTP)—is now available for download. This SQL Server 2005 June CTP is the first preview version to be generally publicly available. All the prior preview versions have been private beta releases.

Related to the SQL Server 2005 announcement, Flessner also stated that SQL Server Reporting Services for 2005 will be available in a wider variety of SQL Server 2005 versions than originally reported. SQL Server Reporting Services will be available with all SQL Server 2005 versions, not just some of the higher-end SKUs. SQL Server Report Builder will be available with most SQL Server 2005 versions but will not be included with the entry-level SQL Server Express Edition.

Continuing the statistical theme from Ballmer's day-one keynote, Flessner provided quite a few data points on SQL Server 2005 cost and performance relative to SQL Server 2000 and Oracle. Comparing SQL Server 2005 against Microsoft's older SQL Server 2000, using the TPC-C benchmarks (www.tpc.org) running on identically configured HP Intel-based server hardware, Flessner stated that SQL Server 2005 provides a 37 percent performance improvement and 17 percent cost savings vs. SQL Server 2000. Running the same TPC-C comparison against Oracle, SQL Server 2005 was shown to outperform Oracle by 7 percent and provide a 37 percent cost savings.

Flessner also provided more data showing Microsoft's security advantages vs. competitors, as well as Microsoft's own security improvements over the last few years. This time the security focus was on database server vulnerabilities. Using data from http://www.osvdb.org/ and http://secunia.com/, Flessner showed that Microsoft has reduced the number of SQL Server 2000 vulnerability reports from 11 in 2002 to one in 2004 and none so far in 2005. In that same timeframe he compared these results to Oracle's database, which had 20 security vulnerability reports in 2002 and 79 in 2004, with two so far in 2005.

Microsoft is not the only company running SQL Server 2005 in a production setting. Even though the product has not yet released, seven corporations are already running SQL Server 2005 live in production and more than 25 are expected to be running it live before the November launch.