SQL Lion

Overview:

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) produced by Microsoft. Its primary query languages are MS-SQL and T-SQL.

Below is the Release History for SQL server:

SQL Server 2005

SQL Server 2005, released in October 2005, is the successor to SQL Server 2000. It included native support for managing XML data, in addition to relational data. For this purpose, it defined an xml data type that could be used as a data type in database columns.

SQL Server 2008

The current version of SQL Server, SQL Server 2008, (code-named “Katmai”,) was released on August 6, 2008 and aims to make data management self-tuning, self organizing, and self maintaining with the development of SQL Server Always On technologies, to provide near-zero downtime. SQL Server 2008 will also include support for structured and semi-structured data, including digital media formats for pictures, audio, video and other multimedia data. In current versions, such multimedia data can be stored as BLOBs (binary large objects).  SQL Server 2008 can be a data storage backend for different varieties of data: XML, email, time/calendar, file, document, spatial, etc  as well as perform search, query, analysis, sharing, and synchronization across all data types.  Other new data types include specialized date and time types and a Spatial data type for location-dependent data. Better support for unstructured and semi-structured data is provided using the new FILESTREAM data type, which can be used to reference any file stored on the file system. Structured data and metadata about the file is stored in SQL Server database, whereas the unstructured component is stored in the file system. Such files can be accessed both via Win32 file handling APIs as well as via SQL Server using T-SQL;

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