Product Description

SQL Server 2005 is a comprehensive database platform providing enterprise-class data management with integrated business intelligence (BI) tools. The SQL Server 2005 database engine provides more secure, reliable storage for both relational and structured data, enabling you to build and manage highly available, performant data applications for use in your business.

Microsoft has redesigned the SQL Server 2005 product family to better meet the needs of specific customer segments by introducing four new editions: Express, Workgroup, Standard, and Enterprise.

These new editions offer a range of features—from high availability and scalability to advanced business intelligence tools—designed to empower users across an organization. As a low-cost mainstream database, SQL Server 2005 delivers unprecedented value and functionality compared with competitive solutions. For demanding enterprise systems, SQL Server 2005 represents a dramatic step forward, with reduced application downtime, and high scalability and performance, and tight security-related controls.

SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition scales to the performance levels required to support enterprise online transaction processing (OLTP), highly complex data analysis, data warehousing systems, and Web sites. With comprehensive business intelligence, robust analytics capabilities and high-availability features such as failover clustering and database mirroring, SQL Server Enterprise can handle the most critical enterprise workloads.

The SQL Server 2005 data engine lies at the core of this enterprise data management solution. Additionally, SQL Server 2005 combines the best in analysis, reporting, integration, and notification. This enables your business to build and deploy cost-effective BI solutions that help your team drive data into every corner of the business through scorecards, dashboards, Web services, and mobile devices.

Close integration with Microsoft Visual Studio, the Microsoft Office System, and a suite of new development tools, including the Business Intelligence Development Studio, sets SQL Server 2005 apart. Whether you are a developer, database administrator, information worker, or decision maker, SQL Server 2005 provides innovative solutions that help you gain more value from your data.

In today's connected world, data and the systems that manage that data must always be secure yet available to your users. With SQL Server 2005, users and information technology (IT) professionals across your organization will benefit from reduced application downtime, increased scalability and performance, and tight yet flexible security controls. SQL Server 2005 also includes many new and improved capabilities to help make your IT staff more productive. SQL Server 2005 includes key enhancements to enterprise data management in the following areas:

• Manageability
  SQL Server 2005 makes it simpler and easier to deploy, manage, and optimize enterprise data and analytical applications. As an enterprise data management platform, it provides a single management console that enables data administrators anywhere in your organization to monitor, manage, and tune all of the databases and associated services across your enterprise. It provides an extensible management infrastructure that can be easily programmed using SQL Management Objects, enabling users to customize and extend their management environment and independent software vendors (ISVs) to build additional tools and functionality to further extend the capabilities that come out of the box.

• Availability
  Investments in high-availability technologies, additional backup and restore capabilities, and replication enhancements will enable enterprises to build and deploy highly available applications. Innovative high-availability features such as database mirroring, failover clustering, database snapshots, and enhanced online operations will minimize downtime and help to ensure that critical enterprise systems remain accessible.

• Scalability
  Scalability advancements such as table partitioning, snapshot isolation, and 64-bit support will enable you to build and deploy your most demanding applications using SQL Server 2005. The partitioning of large tables and indexes significantly enhances query performance against very large databases.

• Security
  SQL Server 2005 makes significant enhancements to the security model of the database platform, with the intention of providing more precise and flexible control to enable tighter security of the data. A considerable investment has been made in a number of features to provide a high level of security for your enterprise data including the following:

  • Enforcing policies for SQL Server login passwords in the authentication space.

  • Providing for more granularity in terms of specifying permissions at various scopes in the authorization space.

  • Allowing for the separation of owners and schemas in the security management space.

SQL Server 2005 includes many new technologies that bring significant increases in developer productivity. From .NET Framework support to tight integration with Visual Studio, these features provide developers with the ability to more easily create secure, robust database applications at a lower cost. SQL Server 2005 enables developers to take advantage of existing skills across a variety of development languages while providing an end-to-end development environment for the database. Native XML capabilities also allow developers to build new classes of connected applications across any platform or device.

Enhancements for developer productivity include the following:

• Expanded language support

• Improved development tools

• Extensibility

• Improved data access

• XML and Web services

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Features Comparison

Processor:

• 600-megahertz (MHz) Pentium III-compatible or faster processor; 1-gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor recommended

Operating System:

• Microsoft Windows 2000 Server with Service Pack (SP) 4 or later;
• Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition, Enterprise Edition, or Datacenter Edition with SP 1 or later;
• Windows Small Business Server 2003 with SP 1 or later

• 512 megabytes (MB) of RAM or more; 1 gigabyte (GB) or more recommended

• Approximately 350 MB of available hard-disk space for the recommended installation
• Approximately 425 MB of additional available hard-disk space for SQL Server Books Online, SQL Server Mobile Books Online, and sample databases

• CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive

• Super VGA (1,024x768) or higher-resolution video adapter and monitor

• Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 or later
• For Reporting Services, you need Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) 5.0 or later, and ASP.NET 2.0 or later

• SQL Server 2005 does not support the Banyan VINES Sequenced Packet protocol (SPP), Multiprotocol, AppleTalk, or NWLink IPX/SPX network protocols. Clients previously connecting with these protocols must select a different protocol to connect to SQL Server 2005.
• SQL Server 2005 software works on hardware certified for use with the Microsoft Windows operating system.
• Actual requirements will vary based on your system configuration and the applications and features you choose to install. Additional available hard-disk space may be required.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition: System Requirements

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