Microsoft Provides the Road Map to SQL Server 2000

Earlier this week, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) revealed SQL Server 2000’s new scalability features and detailed its location on the company’s technology road map.

SQL Server 2000 beta 2 is scheduled to be available worldwide in April.

Microsoft’s vision for the product is one in which SQL Server provides customers with virtually unlimited scalability on the Windows 2000 platform — a key element of friction-free operations according to the company.

The ideal current location for enterprises on the road map is to be using a combination of Windows 2000 and SQL Server 7.0, which allows them to use “state-of-the-art hardware and networking technologies” while building large-scale enterprise applications.

The next landmark on the road map will be reached later this year when Microsoft releases SQL Server 2000. The product will have a new feature that enables scale-out partitioning. Distributed partitioned views provide e-commerce customers with unlimited scalability by dividing workload across multiple independent SQL-Server-based servers. SQL Server 2000 will also provide customers with the opportunity to begin evaluating scale-out partitioning for themselves.

Microsoft also announced various database benchmarks that it believes demonstrate the power of the Microsoft platform in both scale-out and scale-up scenarios. In one test, the TPC-C processed 227,079 order transactions per minute, a result achieved with Windows 2000 and SQL Server 2000 running on 12 Compaq ProLiant servers in a scale-out configuration.

Other tests that Microsoft ran established: a new SAP R/3 SD standard application benchmark on both Compaq and Unisys servers, a new record for all platforms with PeopleSoft HRMS and PeopleSoft Financial, and new benchmarks for running TPC-H and CRM systems on Windows.

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