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Upgrading to SQL Server 2005

Make the move to SQL Server 2005 to open up new possibilities and opportunities for SQL Server administrators, developers, and information technology (IT) decision makers in both enterprise and midsize organizations. With up to 35 percent faster transaction processing, advanced business intelligence solutions, and enhanced developer productivity, SQL Server 2005 optimizes your IT infrastructure for growth and helps align IT with business objectives.

Why Upgrade?

"We immediately found SQL Server 2005 to perform at least 20 percent faster than SQL Server 2000."
- Dr. James Holt, VP of Server Development, Townsend Analytics

SQL Server 2008 Open Road Program

Are you not able to move to SQL Server 2008 because you are using third party applications that don’t support SQL Server 2008 yet? SQL Server 2008 Open Road Program is a global program that aligns Microsoft Field Sales, Partner Account Managers, and Developer Evangelists, providing technical and marketing resources and escalating blocking applications to resolution in order to enable you to enjoy the advantages of SQL Server 2008.  By nominating blocking third party applications, you can deploy SQL Server 2008 with confidence.

To nominate an application, start by sending us an email to sqlunblk@microsoft.com

Top Resources

Business and IT decision makers adopt SQL Server 2005 because it optimizes IT environments, delivering a more secure and reliable data management and analysis platform. Learn more by using the following resources.

Upgrade Solutions

  • Watch the 4 New Webcasts with Upgrade Support For Your Infrastructure

    Increase your upgrade skills and technical knowledge with four new SQL Server 2005 webcasts that deliver valuable information and tools to aid you in upgrading your current SQL Server environment. Register now to watch these webcasts and help you take advantage of all-new features and enhancements in SQL Server 2005.

  • Streamline Your DTS Conversions in SSIS

    SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) brings power and performance to SQL Server 2005 well beyond the capabilities of DTS. To streamline these conversions during your upgrade, DTS xChange by Pragmatic Works Software offers a fast and easy way to manage higher quality DTS to SSIS conversions.
       * Faster conversions: DTS xChange helps reduce manual development days to minutes by automatically converting and validating your DTS packages to SQL Server 2005 Integration Services.
       *  Easier management: DTS xChange usually takes less than a minute to download and install. Once installed it will automatically discover the DTS packages you have on your servers and report on the quantity and complexity of your packages. Select the DTS package you want to convert and you're done.
        * Improved quality: DTS xChange uses best practices and rules that will be applied consistently across your development team. Complete your conversion using the same reporting, conversion, and validation methods for better accountability and higher quality. DTS xChange also includes SSIS logging for post-conversion performance monitoring of SSIS.
        * Learn more about DTS xChange
        * Watch a DTS xChange demo

  • Upgrade from MSDE to SQL Express

    Deliver higher performance for your applications, upgrade from MSDE to SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. SQL Server has a larger maximum database size, no workload governor, built-in SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, SQL Server 2005 Management Studio Express.

Case Studies

Featured Case Study

Mediterranean Shipping Company case study

"With SQL Server 2005 we are able to maintain a quality of service that is unsurpassed in our industry."

-- Fabio Catassi, CTO, MSC

The Mediterranean Shipping Company has found that the move from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 has increased its agility in responding to customer needs, simplified its database administration, provided faster query responses, and, in combination with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005, given it an even better development platform.

Read more

 

AIM Healthcare

"Adding things like a reporting solution or OLAP services, the costs just kept building up on the Oracle side while they remained the same on the SQL Server side."
- Adam Solesby, Director of Strategic Development, AIM Healthcare Services

 

Barclays Capital

"The built-in reliability and latency guarantees of TAPS, based on SQL Server 2005, means Barclays Capital traders have up-to-date information on which to base their decisions."
- Robert Byrne, Director, TAPS Development Team, Barclays Capital

 

Department Of Employment and Workplace Relations

"We originally were looking at SQL Server 2005 for the increased throughput and increased memory footprint, but now that we are starting to work with it, we keep finding more and more ways it can help us."
- Brynten Taylor, Director, Technical Services, Dept. of Employment and Workplace

 

National Bureau of Asian Research

"We continue to be impressed with how easily we can evaluate the features of SQL Server 2005, implement them in a production environment, and integrate our services on more than a superficial level."
- Erick Thompson, Senior Programmer, The National Bureau of Asian Research

 

ServiceU Corporation

"When we turned to SQL Server Database Mirroring we saw the opportunity to save the $100,000 that a hardware solution would have cost, while avoiding the potential integration problems posed by third-party software solutions".
- David P. Smith, Chief Technical Officer, ServiceU

 

Read more case studies from other enterprise companies that rely on SQL Server 2005 to power their data management and analysis solution.

Building Your Business Case

Fortune 1000 corporations are taking advantage of the enhanced features in SQL Server 2005 to optimize their IT environment and accelerate business growth by doing the following:

  • Minimizing business disruptions by increasing availability and scalability while significantly lowering IT costs

  • Gaining deeper business insight through richer end-user analytics and reporting tools that result in a faster return on investment

  • Accelerating the development time of line-of-business applications by up to 40 percent with Visual Studio 2005 and Microsoft .NET integration, including 50 to 70 percent code reduction for most scenarios

  • Reducing data management complexity and ease of manageability

Enterprise Data Management Feature Enhancements

Better Business Decisions Feature Enhancements 

Faster Productivity Feature Enhancements

  • Higher availability (99.999 percent) and five times faster failover (~3 seconds) with data mirroring

  • Up to 150 percent better data performance

  • Stronger security and larger database size

  • Simplified manageability

  • New enterprise-capable extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution to load and manage multi-terabyte data warehouses

  • New ad-hoc reporting capabilities

  • Enhanced online analytical processing (OLAP) performance with the unified dimensional model (UDM)

  • Expanded data mining capabilities with five new algorithms

  • Native support for XML Web services and SQL Common Language Runtime (CLR)

  • Integrated developer environment with Visual Studio 2005 and .Net speeds application development by 40 percent

  • Native data encryption for more secure applications

Benchmarks

  • Dell and Microsoft Beat the $1 per tmpC Threshold for TPC-C

    The Transaction Processing Performance Council has published benchmark results highlighting SQL Server 2005 that have broken the $1 price-per-transaction ($/tpmC) barrier—an epic milestone. See the results of how Microsoft and Dell broke this barrier with SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition on an Intel dual-core Xeon CPU.

  • SQL Server 2005 Sets Scalability Records with New TPC Benchmarks

    Read about record-breaking SQL Server 2005 benchmark results from the Transaction Processing Performance Council.

Additional Resources

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