Enterprise Features

SQL 2000 follows the lead of SQL 7, which has turned in a 35% boost in revenue for fiscal year 2000 and won highly visible Web customers such as Barnesandnoble.com and Buy.com. However, SQL 7 hasn’t dented the lead of IBM and Oracle, which kept a combined share of 60% from 1998 through 1999, based on Dataquest estimates of new database license revenue. By comparison, Microsoft’s estimated share in 1999 was 13%, up from 10% the previous year.

Prices explain some of the revenue gap: SQL Server license fees are lower on average than those of its competitors. There’s a more important factor, however. “We’re focused on Windows, and obviously, that has an effect,” observes Jeff Ressler, lead product manager for SQL Server at Microsoft. Because SQL Server runs only on the Windows platform, it has to fight the perception—fair or not—that the platform isn’t reliable or scalable enough for large, mission-critical databases in the enterprise.

Microsoft hopes to shake that perception with SQL 2000’s high-end Enterprise Edition (EE). EE delivers a host of new features that improve performance and scalability, increase availability, and simplify large-scale management. Both EE and the lower-priced Standard Edition deliver an improved programming environment (see the sidebar “New Development Features“) for code that runs in the database servers. Together, these features make SQL Server a much more competitive product for large corporations and application service providers.