The Keynote

In the TechEd day 2 keynote, Paul Flessner finally ended all speculation by officially announcing that SQL Server 2005, Visual Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 would be launched in the week of November 7. The inclusion of BizTalk 2006 in the announcement took a lot of people by surprise “ and judging by the low quality of some of the Biztalk announcement flyers, one can only assume this was rushed through rather late in the day.

This was a far livelier affair than the somewhat subdued opening day keynote from Steve Ballmer and came complete with a battlebot that destroyed a Server in order to demonstrate SQL failover clustering (he could just have pulled the plug, but hey ).

Paul reported on SQL Server CTP progress (the June CTP is feature complete and available at www.microsoft.com/sql/downloads) and on excellent performance results that have been obtained from 2005 early-build benchmarks. Although one never knows exactly what strings are pulled behind the scenes in some of these benchmarks in order to obtain optimum results “ Kevin Kline mentioned a few little tricks in his excellent session on Performance Benchmarking, Baselining and Monitoring for SQL Server DBAs “ the results are nevertheless impressive. In three TPC-H benchmarks SQL Server 2005 recorded 162% higher performance than SQL Server 2000 and 38% higher performance than Oracle, in the process beating the highest ever TPC-C result for Windows by reaching over 1 million transactions per minute.

One of the biggest complaints I’ve heard from adopters of SQL Server Reporting Services was the supposed unavailability of the Report Builder tool with anything other than the enterprise edition of the database. As such it was a relief to hear Paul’s announcement that Reporting Services will be included with all versions of SQL Server (including Express) and that report builder will be extended to the Standard edition.