Microsoft Sql Server

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system produced by Microsoft. It supports a dialect of SQL, the most common database language. It is commonly used by governments and businesses for small to medium sized databases, and competes with other SQL databases for this market segment.

History

The code base for Microsoft SQL Server originated in Sybase SQL Server, and was Microsoft's entry to the enterprise-level database market, competing against Oracle, IBM, and Sybase. The first version was SQL Server for OS/2 (about 1989) which was essentially the same as Sybase SQL Server 4.0 on Unix, VMS, etc. Microsoft SQL Server 4.2 was shipped around 1993 (available bundled with Microsoft OS/2 version 1.3). About the time Windows NT was coming out, Sybase and Microsoft parted ways and pursued their own design and marketing schemes. Later, Sybase changed the name of its product to Adaptive Server Enterprise to avoid confusion with Microsoft SQL Server. Until 1994 Microsoft's SQL Server carried three Sybase copyright notices as an indication of its origin. The current version, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, was released in August of 2000. Microsoft is beta testing its successor, SQL Server 2005. No release date has been announced, although a beta version is now available for free download.

Description

MS SQL Server uses a variant of SQL called T-SQL, or Transact-SQL, a superset of SQL-92 (The ISO standard for SQL, certified in 1992). T-SQL mainly adds additional syntax for use in stored procedures, and affects the syntax of transactions support. (Note that SQL standards require (ACID) Atomic, Consistent, Isolated, Durable transactions.) MS SQL Server and Sybase/ASE both communicate over networks using an application-level protocol called Tabular Data Stream (TDS). The TDS protocol has also been implemented by the FreeTDS project (http://www.freetds.org) in order to allow more kinds of client applications to communicate with MS SQL Server and Sybase databases. MS SQL Server also supports Open Database Connectivity (ODBC).

Variants

A stripped down version of Microsoft SQL Server known as MSDE (Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine) is distributed with products such as Visual Studio, Visual FoxPro, Microsoft Access, MS Web Matrix, and other products. MSDE has some restrictions: a limit of 2 GB databases, and it comes with no tools to administer it. It also has a workload governor which reduces its speed once you exceed 8 concurrent workloads on the engine. Microsoft recently announced the successor to MSDE, dubbed SQL Server Express. Similar to MSDE, SQL Express includes all the core functionality of SQL Server but places restrictions on the scale of databases. It will only utilize a single CPU, 1 GB of RAM, and imposes a maximum size of 4 GB on databases. SQL Express also doesn't include enterprise features such as Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Data Transformation Services, and Notification Services. Unlike MSDE, SQL Express includes a management console, called SQL Server Express Manager. A beta version of SQL Server Express is now available for download.

Slammer worm

A computer worm, named the SQL slammer worm, which exploited a previously patched security vulnerability in this system was discovered in January, 2003, and caused a large Internet slowdown on January 24. It is possible that this worm caused the largest degradation in Internet performance since the infamous Morris worm (November 2, 1988).

See also

External links

SQL Server

 

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