SQL Server 2005: What's New?

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Microsoft SQL Server has shown a lot of growth in its last two releases. With SQL Server 2005, Microsoft continues to aim the tool at enterprise application developers. David Fells examines its most useful new features--and complains about a number of things that Microsoft perhaps shouldn't have done with the program.

Readers familiar with Microsoft SQL Server are aware of the dramatic feature improvements included with each major release of the product since version 5.0. Driven by the desire to compete with Oracle in enterprise applications, SQL Server has shown a lot of growth with the last two releases, versions 7.0 and 2000, adding such features as Data Transformation Services (DTS)and Extensible Markup Language (XML) support.

With the upcoming release of SQL Server 2005, code named "Yukon," Microsoft adds a slew of new features. The new features are largely geared toward enterprise application developers, which was also the case with SQL Server 2000. Microsoft is making a heavy push for Business Intelligence (BI) reporting services in SQL Server 2005, and as a result, many new features try to solve report writing problems. Developers and database administrators in any environment will benefit from these new features, so without further adieu, ladies and gentlemen: SQL Server 2005.

There is a lot of ground to cover with SQL 2005. Some features warrant much more discussion than others, so a lot of minor updates will be somewhat glossed over. First on our list are the changes to the Transact SQL (TSQL) language.

Recursive Queries and Common Table Expressions

Common Table Expressions (CTE) evolved from SQL Server's derived tables. CTEs are refered to in the FROM clause of a query, just like a derived table or view, but unlike a view, CTEs are non-persistent. CTEs share the life of the full query to which they belong. The big improvement here is support for recursion on, in effect, derived tables. With a derived table, you cannot create it once and use it several times in a query, and it cannot refer to itself in a statement. CTEs overcome this. It's an excellent feature with major potential for report writing. This is one of the many low-level feature additions in the BI push in SQL Server 2005.

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