Kimberly Tripp‘s doing an excellent job of showing off the new features in SQL Server 2005, and she’s making reference to SQL Server 2000 for comparison…

Well, here’s my first post from TechEd 2005, Amsterdam…I didn’t get much sleep last night, considering I was on the 0550 flight out of Edinburgh wasn’t a good idea, but, as they say “we are where we are”. And here I am blogging from a break in the session…

My first key takeaway revolves around upgrading from a SQL Server 2000 database to a SQL Server 2005 database. It’s something most of us, as SQL Server users, will have to do at some point (hopefully real soon). I was pleased to learn that Microsoft have set themselves a [stretch] target of 3 minutes for a 2000 to 2005 in-place upgrade. Kimberly also went to great lengths to explain the ins-and-outs of moving a database (she demo’d Northwind, which doesn’t ship with 2005) using detach and attach.

Further examples demonstrated the performance gains to be had from a 2005 upgrade, especially with regard to fast file initialisation: Kimberly created a 2gb database without fast file initialisation enabled…it took 103s. She then proceeded to create the same database with fast file initialisation enabled…the result: 12s. Wow.

One halleluhaj moment is the fact that 2005’s dialog boxes are now non-modal, i.e. you don’t need to open Enterprise Manager (or 2005’s SQL Server Management Studio, SSMS) in order to do more than one thing at a time!

Demos were in a Virtual PC window, with 1GB running XP-32 on an AMD-64…the VPC was very “performant”!