- Introduction to SQL Server 2000
- Availability Features
- Environmental/Hardware Features
- Database Engine
- Summary
Environmental/Hardware Features
SQL Server 2000 has significantly improved hardware enhancements versus earlier versions of the RDBMS. Some of the improvements have been subtle; others make the RDBMS a bigger player in the corporate marketplace.
The changes to SQL Server 2000 versus earlier versions are described in the following sections.
Multiple Instances of SQL Server
SQL Server 2000 can support multiple instances of the RDBMS on a single server, while allowing all instances to be managed and configured separately. Each instance has its own user and system databases, and runs with its own database engine. Currently, a maximum of 16 instances is supportedgenerally the default instance plus 15 named instances.
Editions of SQL Server
Several editions of SQL Server 2000 are available:
SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. Designed for large-scale enterprises or companies requiring high availability as a production RDBMS. Incorporates all of the features of SQL Server 2000, including clustering and federated database servers.
SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition. Designed for small to medium-sized organizations that require a fast, high-throughput transactional system, without the expense of high-availability requirements. This edition supports a subset of the full feature set.
SQL Server 2000 Personal Edition. Designed for mobile or home users who need to store data locally or run applications while out of the office. This edition provides a full feature set and the same underlying database engine as the other editions, but without most of the high-availability options.
SQL Server 2000 Developer Edition. A full version of SQL Server 2000, incorporating the same features as Enterprise Edition, but licensed only for the development and testing lifecycles. This edition cannot be used as a production system.
SQL Server 2000 Windows CE Edition. Used for storing data on the Windows CE platform, this edition allows remote users to capture data; when the user returns to the office, he or she can synchronize the captured data with the production environment.
NOTE
Your developers will be required to write code to implement this feature!!
SQL Server 2000 Desktop Edition. A redistributable version of the relational database engine, this edition provides developers with a way of storing data within their applications, similar to the way Microsoft Access was used in the past. The Desktop Edition doesn't have any management tools; developers must provide this functionality to users of their systems. Data storage cannot exceed 2GB.
Multiple CPU Support
With the implementation of SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition and Windows 2000 DataCenter, the RDBMS will run on systems with up to 32 CPUs! This provides a large amount of processing power for some of the largest RDBMSs around.
With the new processing architecture of SQL Server 2000, known as Intra-Query Parallelism, SQL statements can be distributed across multiple CPUs. This setup allows the processing load to be dispersed across the processors, which is faster than executing the SQL statements sequentially on a single processor.
64GB Memory Support
Like the CPU enhancements, SQL Server 2000 includes significant enhancements to the memory architecture. With an installation of SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition running on Windows 2000 DataCenter, enterprises can install up to 64GB of RAM into their database server, and SQL Server 2000 will be able to use the additional memory.
With large memory support, SQL Server 2000 can cache considerable amounts of data into memory, and doesn't have to read from disk to return the results of a querythereby offering significant performance enhancements. In fact, smaller databases can be loaded entirely into memory. The data is then read directly from memory, eliminating disk access and the associated redundancy of reading from disk.