Microsoft launches the Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 big guns

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 8 Nov 2005 at 12:18

Similarly, an executive from The Ministry of Sound spoke at the UK launch, about how at the point of identification of a member - perhaps when they enter the club - their lifetime spend can be identified and broken down, via the SQL Server analysis services. In other words, existing data can be drilled in more flexible and constructive ways, potentially opening up further business opportunities.

Barnes & Noble cited their use of a 3TB data warehouse, with all business transactions - including e-commerce - crossing into the warehouse. In other words, there is a lot of data being stored but it is the quality of access that can make it useful.

Marking the releases, entry-level Express editions of the products have been made freely available. The Express edition of SQL Server was always going to be free, but the Visual Studio edition was going to be priced at $49. This is described as a 'launch offer' and the Express editions will be free for at least 'a few months'.

Arguably it is a move to cut-off further advances from the open source MySQL, a part of LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python), the open source enterprise software stack. Microsoft executives, however, denied it was a serious rival compared to Oracle offerings.

Because of its close integration with SQL Server and Visual Studio, Microsoft also highlighted the new version of BizTalk Server, its business process management software, which is due to appear in Q1 2006. There are new built-in Adapters for working with third-party software from Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle and JD Edwards, among others and the inclusion of real-time business process alerts.

Described as the biggest launch in Microsoft history, a number of events are planned across some 89 countries. In the UK, the official customer launch is taking place in Birmingham today.