Well this weekend I received my copy of the SQL server 2005 community preview. And last night I successfully migrated my MSSQL 2000 server to the 2005 server. The installation started a bit rocky as I had a few Microsoft beta products installed, such as the 2.04 framework. Once I removed these beta products the installation went very smoothly. It allowed to create a second instance of SQL server 2005 and run it side by side with my current SQL server 2000 instance. With both servers up at once it was very easy to move my data and stored procedures over.
After evaluating the server for only a day I must say that I am extremely impressed. As a developer the user interface is so much easier to work in. They have centralized most objects in to one management studio. Also I was extremely impressed with the large number of new features available. Though I have not really had time to really evaluate all of the new features from what I have seen they should make my life allot more organized and speed up my queries.
What really impressed me the most was the speed that my queries were being returned after I updated. Without making any changes to my code, my stored procedures and queries were being executed noticeably faster. Also packaged with the community preview was and updated MSXML parser and a new release of .net 2 (2.05). Both seem to be very stable and fast as well.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a few screen shots to wet your taste buds:
Login |
Activity Monitor |
Configuration Manager |
Create To |
Log Files |
Query Window |
Reporting Window 1 |
Reporting window 2 |
Security Management |
Table Design Minor Annoyances After the 2.05 update of .net I had a few problems that I can classify as annoyances at this point.
1. The 2.04 build of asp.net added an asp.net tab to my IIS site properties window which allowed me to switch between the 1.1 framework and the 2.0 framework. After the update to 2.05 not only was this tab missing but the default application was set to .net 1.1. I had to manually repoint all of the associations to the correct asapi file.
2. There seems to be s funny
skip navigation links link appearing in my asp:SiteMapPath. This does not appear in my web.sitemap file and quiet frankly I have no idea where it came from. Even funnier it only appears in firefox.