As a consultant, the process of designing and developing technology-based solutions is one that you get to know intimately, thanks to iteration. Having been involved in a dozen or more projects in the past few years, I came to realize that a common component exists at the center of every one of those solutions. That component is the data storage system. Whether you are developing an electronic commerce Web site, a line-of-business solution such as a customer relationship management (CRM) application, or even a simple Win32 applet to store important notes, all of those solutions require a reliable, efficient, and proven data storage architecture. Providing that data storage component is the role of Microsoft SQL Server 2000. With industry-leading scalability, proven reliability, and unmatched ease of use, SQL Server 2000 can offer numerous advantages and efficiencies to building your solutions. Understanding the broad range of SQL Server s capabilities and how to implement them in your solutions is the goal of this book.

When Microsoft purchased the rights to the co-developed SQL Server project from Sybase in 1995, the necessity of a reliable data storage system was already evident. Released as Microsoft SQL Server, the product suffered for several years as a departmental database server, given its limited capabilities and scalability. SQL Server 7.0 entered the market in 1999 and moved SQL Server into the enterprise-class relational database management systems (RDBMS) market. With never before offered usability improvements, a self-tuning database engine, numerous application enhancements such as full-text indexing, English query...