The SQL Server 2005 Roadshow was a great success. My company, Knowledge Management Associates had a booth at the roadshow and I was not only able to meet many MCDBAs, but also CIOs, CTOs, and developers. If you think about it, it will affect all corporations that have implemented SQL Server 2000 in their organization and thus the reason why professionals of this caliber were present.
I had the opportunity to participate in the breakout sessions. One of the sessions was led by Kent Tegeles at DevelopMentor. His session was Programming in SQL Server Using the Hosted .NET Runtime. He explained the use of assemblies in the new SQL '05 database, its scalability (not), and about the SQL CLR. In case you did not know, in order for assemblies to run inside of SQL Server, they have created a Common Language Runtime called the SQL CLR. This is similar to the .NET CLR except that all assemblies run in the context of the SQL CLR. With that, assemblies in the SQL CLR can be placed in three states. That is SAFE, EXTERNAL_ACCESS, or UNSAFE. These states imply that some scary stuff can be installed in the database. Safe implies everything runs in the context of the SQL CLR, Extenal_Access implies access to the file system to grab xml files or anything else, and Unsafe is exactly it. Very Unsafe, you can perform pInvokes, access the file system, call other executables, etc. Now, because SQL CLR is a common language runtime, assemblies run within its own AppDomain. Well, that makes sense since that is what happens with assemblies in the .NET CLR, but what that also means is that you can create your assembly in Visual Studio.NET, deploy it in debug mode to your database, and step through it because the pdb database files have also been deployed to the database. Isn't that interesting...Well it is.
I was also able to go to the Building Business Intelligence Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services breakout session. This breakout session was done by Stacia Misner at Hitachi Consulting. What a great breakout session this was. If you have every built database cubes using SQL Analysis Services like I have, you might find that it is exciting but limiting at the same time. For instance, you have to build the cubes while connected to the server, you can not view and modify more than one dimension at a time, you can not create more than one fact table for a given cube and you can not form logical relationships between the fact tables. Well, in SQL Server '05 that has changed. That is right, now you can do all of these. Build database cubes in a disconnected fashion using the BI Development Studio, create and view multiple dimensions, create and view multiple fact tables in cubes, and give logical relationships to the fact tables. Not only that, we can create fact table out of any disparate data source Oracle, XML, Excel, DB2, Access, etc. Realistically speaking most organizations is going to connect to their Oracle and SQL backend tables in a cube. Nevertheless, it is just like Microsoft to give you a great amount of flexibility. Oh, did I forget to mention that when building your OLAP database using the BI Development Studio that it creates it as a project within a solution file, much like Visual Studio, and saves your changes to an XML file on your development machine. What that gives you is the capability to deploy the project to the Analysis Server for it to build. What is even more interesting, is that it allows you to make changes to the project at a later time and redeploy only what has changed, so that the entire project is not redeployed. That is fantastic.
Let me tell you, there is even more to blog when it comes to SQL Server '05. However, I hope you have figured out by now, this is a very different animal to tackle. Therefore, my suggestion is to download the free SQL 2005 Express Beta and get to know what is new in SQL '05.
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