SQL Server 2000 consists of numerous components that interact to provide complete database application capabilities, including relational database management, OLAP, data mining, full-text indexing, data import and export, and replication, as well as client access, as depicted in Figure 4.1. In the later chapters of this book, we review each of these components in detail and assist you in configuring and using them in your applications. This chapter begins by exploring the base components of SQL Server and its databases.

Figure 4.1: SQL Server architecture overview.

SQL Server 2000 s relational database architecture is highly scalable and reliable and continues to meet the growing demands of thousands of customers with databases into the terabytes and users in the thousands. The foundation of every SQL Server solution begins with the same component: the database. Each SQL Server instance can support up to 32,767 databases, each with a maximum database size of 1,048,516 terabytes (TB). SQL Server 2000 has also increased the maximum size of its log files from 4TB in version 7.0 to 32TB in SQL Server 2000, offering greater transactional capacity. Table 4.1 provides the maximum database properties of SQL Server 2000.