Note: This review is little bit technical and funny to follow.
Company Profile
If any one has to learn the game of Perfection, it has to be from Microsoft, They observe competitors very closely and the moment they feel there competitor has a product which has future they simply come up with an new product which takes out the life of the rival product.
Here are few instances
•Apple Macintosh introduced GUI(Graphic User Interface) technology and the next moment Microsoft perfected it by releasing Windows.
•Lotus and wordstar came up with an spreadsheet and word processor packages for day to day business needs and the next moment Microsoft perfected it by releasing MS Office in one shot.
•Boroland came up with OOP’s (Object Oriented Programming) based C++ and the next movement Microsoft perfected it by releasing VC++.
•Unix brought an revolution in networking technology and now the famous Windows NT came out from Microsoft.
•Then to my subject of review today database ORACLE Corp became de facto king in database market and Microsoft released SQL SERVER with a bang.
I hope thats enough of the company background, now straight away lets get into the review.
Introduction
In today’s Internet world were e-commerce is the new mantra of IT Managers, database plays a very vital role.
In most simple terms Database is all about the way you store and retrieve information in a relational manner.
New Features in SQL-Server 2000 I like the most
•XML Enabled
you can use XML documents to directly insert and update SQL Server tables.
This will definitely help in sharing of content.
•Triggers
In 7.0 version triggers were ment to fire when an action takes place, but a new flexibility is added in 2000 version were by now users can execute instead of triggering action.
•New DataType
The most interesting aspects regarding 2000 version is the addition of table itself as a data type which permits us to store temporary data in it.
•Cascading Declarative Referential Integrity
Now its very simple to set a relationship between an parent and a child table and then update or delete rows in the parent table automatically cascades to corresponding rows in the child table.
For those of you who are having SQL-Server 7.0 and are thinking of upgrading:
Some of the functions which are present is sql-server 7.0 do not work in 2000 for example following commands do not work
default sortorder id
resource timeout
extended memory size
spin counter
language in cache
time slice
language neutral full-text
unicode comparison style
max async IO
unicode locale id
For those of you who have hardware limitations I will Advice you to stick to 7.0 if you are satisfied with its functionalities.
SQL Server 2000 is very demanding in resources it does not work on Pentium Pro machines, and requires 270 MB HDD(Hard Disk) space instead of 180 MB HDD space for full installation for 7.0 version.
My Final conclusion is that, go for it if you need a feature only present in it and not in 7.0
Thanks for listening to me.