Microsoft will ship its SQL Server 7.0 RDBMS at the annual Comdex show in mid-November, a company official has confirmed.
The release of the much-anticipated product at the Las Vegas exposition was acknowledged by Shaun McKall, a Microsoft business development representative based in California, at a special session for Microsoft partners in San Francisco.
The database focuses on four themes: easier deployment, scalability from laptops to clustered servers, improved manageability, and data warehousing.
A host of wizards for functions such as job scheduling and index tuning are also featured. Other enhancements include a multidimensional data analysis server, code-named Plato, and row-level locking, for more granular data access.
Version 7.0's on-demand memory and disk function provides memory to either the OS or database on demand, and enables limits to be set on database growth.
A SQL agent function controls communications with different machines for remote administration.
A SQL Server user called the release "a huge improvement" vs Version 6.5.
Graphical interface
For example, a feature called DaVinci design tools provides a graphical interface for database design, as opposed to requiring users to hand-code databases, said Jack Stockholm, a network administrator at Legal Technologies, a US company that develops document management solutions for the legal industry.
"Certainly, it's a big step from [Version] 6.5," Stockholm said.
"If all they claim is in it, it's starting to become a competitor to Oracle."
