What’s New in SQL Server 2005—Enhancements for Data Base

Administrators.

SQL Server 2005 has a single management console that enables data base
Administrators monitor, manage and tune all databases and services. The SQL
Management Object(SMO) is an extensible management infrastructure can be easily
programmed. It exposes all the management functionalities of the SQL Server and is
implemented as a Microsoft .NET Framework assembly. The primary purpose of the
SMO is to automate administrative tasks such as retrieving configuration settings,
creating new databases, applying T-SQL scripts, Creating SQL Server Agent jobs and
so on. The users can customize or extend the management environment and build
additional tools and functions to extend the capabilities that come packaged in the
box. It is in short more reliable, scalable than Distributed Management Objects
(DMO).

The SQL Server Management Studio is a one point access to a number of services
– the relational database, the Integration services, Analysis services, Reporting
services, Notification Services and SQL Mobile. Using this interface DBAs can author
or execute a query, view server objects, manage an object, monitor system activity
or even seek online help. As it is integrated with source control, scheduling of SQL
Server Agent jobs also becomes possible. Daily maintenance and operation tasks can
be monitored.
Administrators can now proactively monitor and tune the server using the Dynamic
Management Views (DMVs). There are more than 70 new measures of internal
database performance and resource usage.
One of the major concerns of the database administrator is to ensure continuous
availability of data. Database mirroring, failover clustering, snapshots or fast
recovery would be areas he would be concerned with. SQL Server 2005 allows
continuous streaming of the transaction log from a source server to a destination
server which takes over seamlessly in the case of failure of the primary server.
Support for server clustering has been extended to Analysis services, Notification
Services and SQL Server replication and the number of nodes has also been
increased to eight. Instant, read only views of the database can be created using
snapshots. These provide a stable view without the time or storage overhead
normally required in these instances. The snapshot pages are added automatically as
and when the pages are modified. Hence quick recovery becomes possible. This
ability is further enhanced with the fast recovery option which enables users connect
with a recovering database after a transaction has been rolled forward.

Running server connections can be accessed using the dedicated administrator connection
even when the server refuses to respond. As a result diagnostic functions or T-SQL
statements can be executed to troubleshoot problems on a server. The sysadmin fixed
server role is activated by the members and can be accessed using the SQLCMD
command prompt utility remotely or locally.
The indexing capabilities of the SQL Server 2005 have been greatly enhanced.
Indexes can be created, rebuilt or dropped online without disturbing existing
indexes. This online indexing capability allows parallel processing, concurrent
modifications to the table in the database or clustered index data or any other
associated indexes. Additionally the online restore option improves the availability of
data even when restore operations are being performed.

The peer to peer model of replication enables synchronization of transactions

with an identical peer database. This further improves availability.

Enhancements that ensure scalability include table partitioning, snapshot isolation, and 64
bit support. This improves query performance.

Table and index partitioning eases the management of large databases by

dividing the whole into manageable chunks. The concept is not new to the SQL
Server, but the partitioning of tables horizontally across file groups in the database is
new. The partitioning can be made for gigabytes and terabytes and more.

The snapshot isolation feature allows users access the last row that was
committed by providing a transactional and consistent view of the database. It
makes for increased data availability for read only applications; it allows non blocking
read only operations in OLTP environment; it automatically detects conflicts in write
transactions and makes for simplified migration of applications from Oracle to SQL
Server.

The Replication monitor tool defines a new standard for managing complex data
replication operations. Its interface is intuitive and has a number of data metrics that
are useful.

The new SQL Server 2005 is optimized for the Intel Itanium processor and takes
advantage of the advanced memory capabilities for essential resources such as
buffer pools, caches and sort heaps. This reduces the need to perform multiple I/O
operations and makes for greater processing capacity without the disadvantage of
I/O latency. The support for 32 bid applications is retained while 64 bit capabilities
have been introduced to make the migration smooth and efficient.

The security model of the database platform now provides more precise and
flexible control for ensuring security of data. It enforces passwords for
authentication, provides granularity in terms of specifying permissions in the
authorization space and separates owners and schemas for the manager.

The Encryption capabilities of the database have been integrated with the
management infrastructure for centralization of security assurance and server policy.

Secure computing measures have been put in place to enable deployment of a

secure environment. Confidentiality, integrity and availability of data and systems is
the primary focus at every stage of the software life cycle—from design to delivery
and maintenance.
A new application framework with Service Broker, Notification Services, Server
Mobile and Server Express has been introduced. The Service Broker is a distributed
application that provides reliable asynchronous messaging at the database to data
base level. Notification services helps in development and deployment of applications
that generate and send personalized notifications to a wide variety of devices based
on preferences specified by the application user. SQL Server Mobile edition enables
the creation of a mobile edition database on the desktop or device directly from SQL
Server Management Studio. The schema can be manipulated locally or remotely.

SQL Server Express Manager (XM) is a free Query Editor tool that is available for
download and allows for easy database management and query analysis capabilities.

Business Intelligence in SQL Server 2005 is scalable, comprehensive and comes

with a number of reporting capabilities. Both basic and innovative kinds of analytical
applications can be built from end to end.

The Integration services are a redesigned enterprise ETL platform that enables
users integrate and analyze data from multiple heterogeneous sources. Significantly,
SQL Server 2005 goes beyond traditional services and supports Web services and
XML and out of the box services through SSIS to bring analytics to the data without
persisting data, Data mining and text mining in data flow for data quality and data
cleansing.

Analysis Services provides a unified and integrated view of the business data by
using the Unified Dimensional Model which is mapped to a host of heterogeneous
back end data sources. User friendly descriptions and navigation hierarchies make it
a pleasure to use.

The Data mining and Intelligence technology is designed to build complex analytical
models and integrate such models to the business operations. The rich set of tools,
API’s and algorithms provides customized data driven solutions to a broad range of
business data mining requirements.

Reporting services is a server based BI platform managed via Web Services.

Reports can be delivered in multiple formats interactively. Relational and OLAP
Reports comes with an inbuilt query editors—SQL Query Editor and MDX Query
Editor. The reports can be built together or separately. The Report builder feature
has been newly introduced to enable BI users to create customized reports that rides
on the Microsoft Office paradigms of Excel and PowerPoint and has a click once
feature that enables it to be deployed via a browser.