With the Yukon release of SQL Server now in private beta, SQL Server Magazine talked with Microsoft's Eric Brown about the release's long-awaited development and administration enhancements and how DBAs and developers can start preparing for the changes ahead. Brown, a SQL Server Group product manager who has worked with the database system since SQL Server 7.0 launched in 1999, hits the Yukon high spots, including Common Language Runtime (CLR) integration, the new SQL Workbench management tool, and business intelligence (BI) enhancements—all designed to make SQL Server the most comprehensive and integrated relational database management system (RDBMS) available.
What are the most significant changes that SQL Server Yukon will bring to the lives of SQL Server DBAs and developers?
We've made significant changes to the SQL Server subsystems by adding new technology in the areas of distributed applications, business intelligence (BI), high availability, manageability, and .NET development. Yukon will be a major advancement for both developers and DBAs because of these new features and because of the integration that Yukon has with other Microsoft technologies such as Windows Server and Visual Studio.
In addition, when we presented the new SQL Server Reporting Services technology in February at the Yukon Technical Preview, our customers were excited about the report creation and distribution innovations we were working on. Microsoft in general and the SQL Server team specifically are very focused on the SQL Server community. And we're responding to this overwhelming customer demand for Reporting Services by shipping the first version as a SQL Server 2000 add-in this year. Yukon will then ship with Reporting Services built into it. Anyone interested in trying out Reporting Services now can get the beta at http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/betanominations.asp.
We've continually evolved the SQL Server feature set to help match the varied needs and requirements of our customers. With Yukon, we are working hard to incorporate feedback from customers and to offer a substantive upgrade that will position SQL Server as the single source for meeting all our customers' database-computing needs.
How important is Visual Studio .NET integration and knowledge to the success of the Yukon release?
The next release of Visual Studio .NET, code-named Whidbey, includes deep SQL Server integration and is scheduled to ship at the same time as Yukon. This release of Visual Studio and the .NET Framework hosting technology provides the powerful new Common Language Runtime (CLR) capabilities that developers can use to better leverage object-oriented programming skills in the database tier.
T-SQL is the best query language for relational databases and always will be. But our goal in integrating Yukon with the CLR is to allow customers to use the .NET Framework class libraries within the database and use CLR languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C# to write database code as needed. With Yukon, the SQL Server database and its requisite developer tools will ship simultaneously.
Microsoft has talked a lot about its .NET development efforts in Yukon, but how do you position T-SQL in the product? And to what extent will Yukon comply with the ANSI SQL-99 standard?
T-SQL is still and will remain SQL Server's core query language. In our development of SQL Server Yukon, we didn't pursue ANSI SQL-99 core compliance simply for the sake of compliance. Instead, we've chosen to implement features that are in line with feedback we've received from customers. When such features become standard and useful to customers, we try to bring them into our products so that they're as standards-compliant as possible. We'll be adding the following SQL-99 features in Yukon:
- Recursive queries (WITH <common-table-expression>)
- Separate date and time data types
- Ranking functions and windowing, according to OLAP extensions in SQL-99
- User-defined data types (the definition isn't standards-compliant, but the usage is mostly compliant with SQL-99 structured types)
Among our many other T-SQL enhancements, we've also added TRY...CATCH constructs for handling errors, a native XML data type, new operators for pivoting results, an improved TOP function, and more functional and flexible event-notification capabilities.