XML Hooks SQL Server into Next-Generation Applications

New Web access and Extensible Markup Language (XML) features put SQL Server 2000 at the center of Microsoft’s Next Generation Web Services (NGWS) application architecture. These features will enable new Web and e-commerce applications in which the database server does much of the grunt work for which developers currently write code. The features could change the basic architecture of Web sites, shifting the focus from the Web server to the database server and the applications built on top of it. Organizations waiting for NGWS can use Beta 2 of SQL Server 2000 to understand Microsoft’s future development and services platform.

(This is the first in a series of articles on SQL Server 2000. Future articles will cover the most notable new enterprise features, including better multiprocessor and cluster performance, management of very large databases, and “data mining” for online analytic processing.)

Overview and Goals

SQL Server 2000 provides XML and Web support through both the database server itself and middle-tier components that can run on the Internet Information Server (IIS) Web server. The database server can both build XML documents and extract information from them. The middle-tier components let Web browsers and applications send queries to the database server, and get XML or HTML documents in response, using the standard Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that powers the Web.