Sql Server 2005 - Biztalk 2006 will be here soon....

Greetings,

It is official - the countdown to launch has begun! During my Tech.Ed keynote this morning, I announced that SQL Server(TM) 2005, Visual Studio^® 2005 and BizTalk^® Server 2006 will launch the week of November 7. This will be the biggest launch ever for these products, and we're very excited to deliver them to you.

Some of you might be surprised to see that BizTalk Server 2006 has been added to the list of products that will make their debut in November, but from an integrated experience perspective this is an important addition. Many customers already benefit from the integrated development environment of BizTalk Server built on Visual Studio to quickly integrate and automate business processes that span applications, systems and trading partners. By integrating Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006, we hope to change the way you think about and use application infrastructure with your connected systems.

We continue to work closely with customers and partners as we get ready for the launch. To date, we have seven customers that have put applications based on the SQL Server 2005 Community Technology Previews (CTPs) into production and expect to have more than 20 customers in production before we launch. We also had more than 40 partners announce support for Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 today. We are in awe of the support and anticipation we're seeing from the industry for these products and expect this support to continue and even increase as we get closer to launch.

Microsoft Corp. also continues to deploy SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 internally. We have more than 80 applications in production using SQL Server 2005 today, with 10 instances of SQL Server 2005 that are storing multiple terabytes of data. These SQL Server 2005 installations have been responsible for processing more than 7 billion transactions against our SAP system SQL Server 2005 database to date, which includes processing close to 3 million invoices and more than 1.6 million sales orders.

In addition to highlighting the integration benefits of these products, we released a new SQL Server 2005 CTP, the first benchmarks on SQL Server 2005 and a new migration tool to help you migrate from Oracle to SQL Server. We also highlighted new product line updates for SQL Server 2005 and the Microsoft radio frequency identification (RFID) infrastructure initiative, all of which is outlined below:

·         SQL Server 2005 June CTP. We released the first public CTP for SQL Server 2005. The SQL Server 2005 June CTP is feature complete, and we encourage you to download this version as a great start your evaluation of the product.

·         SQL Server 2005 benchmarks. We also announced the first TPC benchmark results for SQL Server 2005 with HP, NEC Corp. and Bull. These companies are leading the way in demonstrating the performance that SQL Server 2005 will provide. Although the tests were conducted using early builds of SQL Server 2005, the results are indicative of the scalability and cost effectiveness you can expect to experience with SQL Server 2005. In three TPC-H benchmarks, SQL Server 2005 had up to 162 percent higher performance than SQL Server 2000 and 38 percent higher performance than Oracle's best result on a 16-processor Intel® Itanium® 2 server at a cost that is 20 percent less per query. In addition, HP also posted a TPC-C result on SQL Server 2005 that is the highest TPC-C result ever for Windows, beating the one million transaction-per-minute mark. The result had 7 percent better performance and cost 37 percent less per transaction than Oracle's best result on a 64-processor Intel® Itanium® 2 server. The benchmark information is available at http://www.tpc.org/.

Changes to the SQL Server 2005 product line. In February, we announced the product line for SQL Server 2005. As part of this announcement, we revealed that Reporting Services would ship with Standard and Enterprise Editions and that Report Builder would be available with Enterprise Edition. Based on your feedback, and because we believe that reporting is a core scenario for all customers, we've made the decision to include Reporting Services in all versions for SQL Server 2005 including Express, Workgroup, Standard and Enterprise Editions. In addition, Report Builder will be available with Workgroup, Standard and Enterprise Editions.

·         SQL Server Migration Assistant for Oracle. To address your requests for automated tools to help you migrate your higher TCO Oracle installations to SQL Server, we also released the SQL Server Migration Assistant for Oracle. This migration tool, now available for free download, provides a faster, easier and more automated way to migrate from Oracle to SQL Server. Customers such as Motorola Inc., Simon & Schuster Inc. and Atento Brasil S/A have successfully migrated from Oracle to SQL Server using the SQL Server Migration Assistant and are already seeing a significant cost savings.

For those of you who are interested in "chopping" your database TCO, we will also award a custom motorcycle to the company which submits the highest-value Oracle migration story. The rules will be announced when the official contest begins June 15, so rev up your engines!

·         RFID initiative. Finally, we announced an initiative to offer a scalable, wireless RFID technology server infrastructure, enabling customers and partners to easily connect line-of-business applications with RFID sensors and devices. The infrastructure is being built using Microsoft .NET and Windows Server System technology and is designed to connect devices, capture and interpret data, manage business events, and integrate systems and processes more easily than ever.

This is an exciting time for us, and whether you're testing early builds or developing applications, we would love to work with you and get more feedback for the development and release of these products. I want to thank you for all your support, and I look forward to seeing you in November at the launch of SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006!

Paul Flessner

Senior Vice President

Microsoft