Components and Features
SQL Server 2005 Contains several components:
- The Data Engine
- The Management studio
- Integration Services
- Notification Services
- Service Broker
- Business Intellgence
- Reporting Services
- A variety of tools for various management tasks
Some of the new features are:
- The new managememt studio
- Database Mirroring
- Extenstions to TSQL
- Support for .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime)
- Native xml data type
- XQuery (and other xml tools)
- Native web services
- Business Intellegence (Data Mining)
- Reporting Services.
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Data Engine
The data engine is the primary component of the DBMS. It manages the databases, their files and logs. It process the SQL for creating projects and running queries. It keeps track of all database objects, data types and security settings. It also includes backup and restore functionality.
The primary new features of the database engine are the addition of XML as a native data type, Extenstions to SQL--primarily the support for DDL triggers and a series of new commands to support another new feature, the abilty to write stored procedures, triggers and functions in CLR (C#, VB), and the support for native web services (That is, web services hosted in the database server itself.
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The Management Studio
The new Management Studio replaces the old Enterprise Manager. It is meant to be much cleaner and intuitive. Microsoft attempted to group more of the functionality in one place. For instance, the query analyser used to be a seperate application, but is now included in the Management studio itself.
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Intetgration Services
Integration Services replace Data Transformation service from SQL Server 2000. Integration Services allow you to import and export data from a variety of sources. For instance, you can combine data from several databases, export or import from Oracle or other DBMSs, import or export delimitted text or xml. Further they allow you to package these processes and data sources so that they can be run automatically at a set time, once or regularly, or manually as needed. These packages contain the input or source for the data, the transformations of the data (from one form to another) and the output or destination of the data.
Service Broker
The service broker tracks and controls all running services including the Notification Services which are used to notify database managers if certain events occur (out of disk space, server failure, dead lock, etc) or if certain conditions are reached (performance indicators, etc).
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Business Intelligence and Reporting
Business Intellegence is basically a set of tools for analysing trends in data, looking for patterns, setting performance indicators etc, in other words Data Mining. These tools are new with Sql Server 2005. They are closely integrated with Visual Studio 2005.
These tools include the Reporting Services. The reporting services provide a set of tools for creating reports from the database data. The reporting services are based on ASP.Net and require IIS (Internet Information Server).
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Other Tooks
Some of the other tools include
- Server Configuration Manager
- Surface Area Configuration
- SQL Command Line Utility
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