*Warning - the following to technology, geek talk, feel free to read though you may not understand - thanks *

Last week MNP sent me to a Microsoft course on programming changes in SQL Server 2005. This was in preparation for our summer projects in which we are converting our major programs to sql server 2005. I’ll get more into that sometime.

Before this course even started, I was reading a bit about the new features, and was quite impressed. Microsoft needed to do something to catch up to the enterprise level of Oracle. Granted, SQL server 2000 worked wonderfully in our environment. Think about the difference between SQL Server and Access database. Why people would still use access databases for anything is beyond me, there’s so much more you can do with SQL Server.

But enough of that. The major upgrade of SQL Server is that it’s now written entirely from the .NET CLR. So one of the major benefits of that, is you can write any classes using C# or VB.net and it will work with SQL Server. i.e. SQL Server stored procedures/functions can now call .NET Classes. Now you may be thinking, so what? Well as an example, here’s what we’ll be using it for. We currently keep encrypted salary information in one of our databases. The only way to get that data out, is to decrypt it used Triple DES encryption. There’s no way for us to write a decrypter in SQL. So what we’ll do now, is call a .NET function decrypting the value. This will allow us to easily query the data for on-demand reports that constantly come in.

Another major addition is the addition of the XML Data type. Now instead of SQL Server holding XML as a large string. It holds it as XML. This allows you to use XML classes and manipulate the data easily right inside stored procedures, thus putting the work on the server and less on the client.

All in all, it’s and impressive release. There’s still a few things they didn’t quite complete, including Notifciation services. They are telling people all the classes (aka API’s) are there to write it yourself, but they have no front end interface to manage it. No big deal.