Today at the BI Conference in Seattle Jeff Raikes from Microsoft has given a first official impact - just slides - on the next SQL Server version.

I have seen a new feature called Change Data Capture (also mentioned in the datasheet) in the session "PL208 Data Warehousing with Microsoft SQL Server 2005" presented by Gopal Ashok, Program Manager with the SQL Server Product team, which was quite impressive.

Ever dealt with the problem of having mass data in a table and no "real" marker to identify the specific rows for incremental data operations like inserts, updates and deletes?
The Change Data Capture should ease your pain by creating a kind of audit table to watch data modification without the need of programming stored procedures, triggers and so on.
I am extremely curious how this feature proves in real life scenarios. And I am also a little bit surprised if the SSIS team will not bring up some new tasks to enable the use of the audit table of the Change Data Capture - or do we still need to develop the handling concerning load cycles, deleting of successfully loaded records, etc by our own? A kind of automatic delta queue mechanism and handling like in SAP systems would be great!

Tomorrow Ted Kummert, corporate vice president of the Data and Storage Platform Division at Microsoft will have a keynote at the morning - I hope that he will show some more live impressions.

You will find the official press release here.

And there also is a information website online.

Regarding to the press release, "SQL Server “Katmai” is scheduled to be delivered in 2008" - but there is no information about CTP´s available on the website yet.

Vera Noest provides a really great link collection of ressources which will be very usefull while doing troubleshoting.

Vera also provides troubleshooting tips for Terminal Server and Citrix.

Worth reading - check it out!

Interested in all the new things in SP2? Here is a complete list.

And this is the complete download site with links for the SP2 itself, a new BOL, new Samples, new Feature Pack and especially the links to SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Technologies and SQL Server 2005 Data Mining Add-ins for Microsoft Office 2007.

To avoid a restart after the installation of the SP2 you should stop the neccessary services which could be done with the following commands on the command line - if you have used the standard instances:

net stop MSSQLSERVER
net stop MSSQLServerOLAPService
net stop msftesql
net stop MsDtsServer
net stop ReportServer

After the installation the "SQL Server 2005 User Provisioning Tool is started automatically if you use Windows Vista. As you probably know, Windows Admins are not automatically also SQL or AS Admins  - this tool enables to set the right privileges to the administartor accounts.

But do not forget to start the services before you try to set the privileges...

If you want to add a new account you will have to start the Provisioning Tool again, but unluckily it is not added to the Start Menu, you will find it at:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Shared\SqlProv.exe - assumed that you have a standard installation and an english version of MS Windows Vista.

Interested in online ressources for SQL Server Training?
Please do not forget that these ressources can not replace a complete Training and therefor only should be considered as a additional point of information...

The SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 1 is available now, which updates your SQL Version to Build 9.00.2047.

• download english version
• download german version
• List of bugfixes
• List of new features

Microsoft also now has published the "SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services", which contains Reporting Services now, and the "Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit", which contains the Business Intelligence Development Studio and a Software Development Kit!
SQL Server 2005 Express now really is worth a look and it is for free, you will be able to download it here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/sql/download/

Download the Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (SQL Server Express) Books Online and samples.

Extract from the website:
"SQL Server 2005 Express Edition (SQL Server Express) is the next version of MSDE 2000. It is a free, easy-to-use, lightweight version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Integrated with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server Express makes it easy to develop data-driven applications that are rich in capability and fast to deploy. To download the samples and product documentation for SQL Server Express, click the links in the Files In This Download section. The samples installation contains over 100 samples, many of which use the AdventureWorks sample OLTP database. For more information about the samples and sample database, see the SQLServerSamplesExpressOverview.htm file below and the SQL Server 2005 Books Online."

Extract from the website:
"SSEUtil.exe is a tool that lets you easily interact with SQL Server. Among other things, it allows you to:
• Connect to the main instance or user-instance of SQL Server.
• Create, attach, detach, and list databases on the server.
• Upgrade database files to match the version of the server.
• Execute SQL statements via the console (similar to SQLCMD).
• Retrieve the version of SQL Server running.
• Enable and disable trace flags (for example, to trace SQL statements sent to the server by any client application)
• List the instances of SQL Server on the local machine or on remote machines.
• Checkpoint and shrink a database
• Measure the performance of executing specific queries.
• Create and playback lists of SQL commands for the server to execute.
• Log all input and output."

Regarding to Russell Christopher´s articel "SQL Express and SQL Reporting Services 2005 – Soon, but not yet" there will be a Version of SQL Express, called SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services, which will be able to be connected to a SSRS from Standard / Dev / Enterprise edition and will bring up an own SSRS coming up in early 2006.

Russle also has posted the link to the SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services Feature Matrix, which gives a clear and fast view, which edition will include which features.

You will find the whole listing here.

A very interesting note is, that "Reporting Services features are not yet available in SQL Server 2005 Express Edition".
When will they be available? Will they come? Or would this be to much features for free compared to the to the Workgroup Edition?

Extract from the website:
"On February 24, 2005, Microsoft announced pricing and licensing information for SQL Server 2005. In that announcement, only the Standard and Enterprise editions of SQL Server 2005 encompassed any reporting features provided by SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services. Furthermore, only the Enterprise version of SQL Server 2005 had Report Builder (ad hoc, self-service reporting). Since that time, SQL Server product management has sought and received significant feedback from both partners and customers on this decision. Because of these conversations, Microsoft is making the following modifications to its SQL Server product lineup relative to reporting."