What's New in SQL Server 2005

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 extends the performance, reliability, availability, programmability, and ease-of-use of SQL Server 2000. SQL Server 2005 includes several new features that make it an excellent database platform for large-scale online transactional processing (OLTP), data warehousing, and e-commerce applications.

Feature Summary

The following topics discuss the new features in the SQL Server 2005 components.

Topic Description

Notification Services Enhancements

Notification Services is a new platform for building highly-scaled applications that send and receive notifications. Notification Services can send timely, personalized messages to thousands or millions of subscribers using a wide variety of devices.

Reporting Services Enhancements

Reporting Services is a new server-based reporting platform that supports report authoring, distribution, management, and end-user access.

New Service Broker

Service Broker is a new technology for building database-intensive applications that are secure, reliable, and scalable. Service Broker provides message queues the applications use to communicate requests and responses.

Database Engine Enhancements

The Database Engine introduces new programmability enhancements such as integration with the Microsoft .NET Framework and Transact-SQL enhancements, new XML functionality, and new data types. It also includes improvements to the scalability and availability of databases.

Data Access Interfaces Enhancements

SQL Server 2005 introduces improvements in the programming interfaces used to access data in SQL Server databases. For example, the SQL Native Client data access technology is new, and the .NET Framework Data Provider for SQL Server, also referred to as SqlClient, is enhanced.

Analysis Services Enhancements (SSAS)

Analysis Services introduces new management tools, an integrated development environment and integration with the .NET Framework. Many new features extend the data mining and analysis capabilities of Analysis Services.

Integration Services Enhancements

Integration Services introduces a new extensible architecture and a new designer that separates job flow from data flow and provides a rich set of control flow semantics. Integration Services also provides improvements to package management and deployment, along with many new packaged tasks and transformations.

Full-Text Search Enhancements

This section describes the programmability enhancements that have been made to Full-Text Search. These enhancements include the data definition language for Full-Text Search and the ability to specify languages in queries other than the default language, and the manageability enhancements, such as side-by-side installs, backup and restore full-text catalogs, and attach and detach full-text catalogs.

Replication Enhancements

Replication offers improvements in manageability, availability, programmability, mobility, scalability, and performance.

Tools and Utilities Enhancements

SQL Server 2005 introduces an integrated suite of management and development tools that improve the ease-of-use, manageability, and operations support for large scale SQL Server systems.

See Also

Other Resources

Upgrading to SQL Server 2005
SQL Server 2005 Database Engine Backward Compatibility
SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services Backward Compatibility
Reporting Services Backward Compatibility
SQL Server 2005 Integration Services Backward Compatibility
Notification Services Backward Compatibility
Replication Backward Compatibility
Full-Text Search Backward Compatibility

Help and Information

Getting SQL Server 2005 Assistance