Executive Summary

Microsoft released public Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2 on Tuesday, 11/7/06. SQL Server 2005 SP2 will include performance updates, increased business intelligence functionality, manageability enhancements, support for Windows Vista and optimization for the 2007 Microsoft Office System environment.

Customer and partner feedback is a critical to the Microsoft SQL Server development process shaping and informing the continued innovations delivered by Microsoft. Active customer collaboration helps ensure the highest quality release designed to meet IT needs and align with business priorities.

What's New document: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=71711

CTP download page: https://www.microsoft.com/sql/ctp.mspx

More Details

Included in the November CTP for SQL Server 2005 SP2 are the following updates and key functionality:

Driving Innovation:

§ Support for the upcoming Windows Vista.

§ Data Mining Add-Ins for Office 2007, which enables data mining functionality from SSAS to be used directly within Excel 2007 and Visio 2007.

§ SSRS integration with MOSS 2007, which allows integration with the Report Center in SharePoint providing seamless consumption and management of SSRS reports within SharePoint.

§ SSAS improvements for Excel 2007 and Excel Services relating to performance and functionality.

Heterogeneous Environments (Interoperability):

§ Oracle Support in Report Builder. Users will now be able to use Report Builder on top of Oracle data sources.

§ Hyperion support with SSRS. Organizations will now be able to use SSRS to build reports on top of Hyperion Essbase cubes.

Performance/Enterprise:

§ Data compression (varDecimal), which is important for data warehouse scenarios and is specifically important for SAP BW scenarios. This requires less disk storage of decimal data which increases overall performance.

§ Manageability enhancements. Based on customer feedback, SQL Server provides enhanced management capabilities for DBAs such as improvements in database maintenance plans, enhanced management reports and a new copy database wizard.

SQL Server Express Edition

§ Management reports have been added to SQL Server Express Edition enabling customers to get insights into the performance of their Express Edition and SQL Server Compact Edition databases.

§ SQL Server Management Studio Express Edition now enables management of SQL Server Compact Edition databases.