In enhancing existing management tools and designing new ones for SQL Server 2005—formerly code-named Yukon—Microsoft's SQL Server Tools team followed two guiding principles: "no secrets" and integration. Euan Garden, product unit manager for SQL Server Tools for SQL Server 2005, tells SQL Server Magazine how his team relied on these principles to build database-management functions that are more transparent, more robust, and easier to use.
What are the top new management tools in SQL Server 2005?
We're introducing several new and exciting tools in SQL Server 2005 that will build on what we provided customers in SQL Server 2000. Microsoft's goal is to continue to enhance database-management functions to make them more robust and easier to use.
SQL Server Management Studio, previously called SQL Server Workbench, is perhaps the most visible new tool in SQL Server 2005. Management Studio combines the functionality of Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer, and Analysis Manager into one consolidated tool. Management Studio also provides integrated management of Reporting Services, Notification Services, XML, SQL Server 2005 Mobile Edition (formerly code-named Laguna), and multiple versions of SQL Server from the same interface for increased DBA productivity, flexibility, and manageability.
Besides integrating the range of functions and technologies I just listed, we've also tried to address as many customer requests as possible within the new Management Studio environment. We received a lot of feedback about Enterprise Manager, which is a key tool for most of our customers today. And we wanted to make it even more productive. Today in Enterprise Manager, people primarily interact with the UI's dialogs, which pop up and block the rest of the UI, making it difficult to do multiple tasks at the same time—especially when Enterprise Manager is performing a long-running operation such as backup and restore. In addition, we found that many users are running SQL Server Profiler with Enterprise Manager to find out what statements Enterprise Manager is sending to the server so they can run the statements later in batch. To address these issues, we've introduced a new type of dialog that's resizable and non-blocking. The new dialogs also let customers script and schedule their actions, which we believe makes the UI much more transparent. We've also streamlined the SQL calls that request information from the server and replaced Current Activity with a new Activity Monitor. The new Activity Monitor performs more efficient queries, automatically refreshes, and supports sorting and filtering.
Another new tool, the Database Tuning Advisor (DTA), replaces the Index Tuning Wizard (ITW), providing a richer, more scalable experience that leverages the core concepts we introduced in the ITW in SQL Server 7.0. To improve productivity, we've separated the UI from the tuning engine. With this new tool, DBAs can leave a tuning session, close the UI, and come back to it later or have multiple sessions tuning at the same time, each session potentially running against different servers. DTA can also recommend a partitioning strategy.
SQL Computer Manager is a new configuration tool that extends Computer Manager and supports disconnected configurations for all the server products, including SQL Server, Analysis Server, and Reporting Server. Good examples of where disconnected configurations could be useful are in setting service accounts (where changing the password no longer requires a reboot) and in creating and editing aliases. You can also perform these tasks through our Management APIs, which provide transparency and control.
In addition, we received a lot of feedback about how to enhance SQL Server 2000 SQLMail. Listening to customer requests, we felt the right solution was not to try to take the SQLMail architecture forward but instead to start leveraging new technologies such as managed code and SQL Server Service Broker to create SQLiMail in SQL Server 2005. We discovered that customers wanted the following: no requirement to install Microsoft Outlook on their servers, added support for the SMTP protocol, and a simpler way to configure the mail solution. SQLMail still exists in SQL Server 2005, but SQLiMail replaces most of its functionality. The new product works very differently from SQLMail because it's not dependent on Messaging API (MAPI) or Outlook and it works in a range of server environments, such as clustered and 64-bit implementations. SQLiMail also works with a wide range of SMTP servers in addition to Microsoft Exchange. SQLiMail actually goes into a Service Broker queue and uses an external .exe file to send mail from outside the server process.
The last new component I can share is SQLCMD, the new command-line tool that replaces osql and, to a lesser degree, isql. In trying to better understand how we could help make DBAs more productive in the operations and command-line environment, we interviewed and watched lots of them as they did their work, primarily using osql, batch files, and script. With SQLCMD, I think we've created a simple yet effective tool that DBAs will love.
What enhancements have you made to existing tools?
For Profiler, we've added support for profiling and replaying Analysis Services, for profiling Data Transformation Services (DTS), for Performance Monitor correlation, for deadlock visualization, for Showplan extraction, and much more. For SQL Agent, we've done a lot of work on performance and security, and we've added features to support Windows Management Interface (WMI)-based alerts and new subsystems such as DTS and Analysis Services.
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