SQL Server 2000 received two awards in late February: Datamation's Product of the Year 2000 for data warehousing and Business Intelligence (BI) and the eWEEK 2001 eXcellence award for enterprise systems development. For the Datamation award, Microsoft notes, none of the competition came close to SQL Server, which received 44 percent of the votes from product users. Voters lauded SQL Server 2000 for its scalability, responsiveness, and security improvements and gave top marks to its administrative functionality. Because SQL Server 2000 is closely integrated with Active Directory (AD), Windows 2000's directory services component, SQL Server 2000 can seamlessly partition workloads across servers. SQL Server has also helped Microsoft win other top BI awards, such as the 2000 DMReview 100 and Intelligent Enterprise's Top 12 Most Influential Companies in IT.
And according to eWEEK, SQL Server 2000 is one of the top 21 new e-business products and services released last year. Microsoft says that SQL Server 2000 "was so far ahead of the competition that no other database received an award." Chosen from a field of 1000 entries from more than 600 companies, SQL Server 2000 received accolades for its "rich set of data-management tools, with ease and economy of tuning and administration." In announcing the award, eWEEK also cited SQL Server 2000 for its programmable data-management and analysis features.