With best-in-class ease of use on the Windows platform, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 SP2 combines strong administration abilities with leading-edge XML support. Though it's still Windows-centric, Microsoft's database can connect to data from a variety of data sources. It performed impressively on our ASP Nile Throughput test but was bottom-of-the- heap on the JSP Nile Throughput test.

SQL Server was the first industrial-strength database that didn't require a black belt in DBA expertise. The trend continues in this version of SQL Server with the Enterprise Manager console—the hands-down ease-of-use leader among the products we evaluated.

We tested SQL Server, with SP2 installed, on Windows 2000 Advanced Server. Unlike DB2, Oracle9i, and Sybase ASE, SQL Server relies on Windows for clustering. The Enterprise Manager has a graphical interface and plenty of wizards for common tasks; it also lets you manage many servers fairly easily through OLE DB, including linked servers and non-SQL Server data sources.

With the Enterprise Manager, we easily defined tables, created users, and set table and column permissions graphically. The backup wizard makes scheduling database backups a snap. We also liked the ability to set up replicated databases quickly with support for snapshot and transaction-based replication. Our sample orders were processed in one database and automatically updated in a second instance, for an instant archive.

The SQL Query Analyzer is the most polished and functional tool we saw for tuning manual SQL queries. It conveniently displays results in either grid or text format and can interrupt long-running queries. We liked its easy-to-view execution plans for SQL queries. In our testing, the index-tuning wizard suggested an index based on subject names to optimize queries for our Web bookstore. The tool then built the index for us based on automated calculations. This illustrates just one way that SQL Server self-tunes where other platforms require manual tweaks.

Earlier versions of SQL Server put OLAP into the reach of organizations that lacked huge budgets. Analysis services wizards let you build and create data cubes, which can generate dimensions and fact tables. The wizards' reporting connects with Excel PivotTables, so you can view different dimensions to analyze sales trends, for example. Though you'd still benefit from data-warehousing expertise, SQL Server's OLAP capabilities are the simplest to use of all those we tested. Their natural-language query processing puts analysis into the hands of ordinary users. SQL Server offers data mining, but Oracle9i has more algorithms.

For XML support, SQL Server users can download the free SQLXML 2.0 add-on package. By default, this add-on supports bulk-additions of XML data into records and can return queries in XML. It also offers Updategrams, which can change data using XML action queries. We successfully used this feature to do a bulk import of several hundred orders.

For database developers, the new .NET Framework classes may offer the fastest and most flexible access to SQL Server databases. We used the dedicated ADO .NET classes for SQL Server for a supplemental .NET version of our performance test (written in C#). For those working in J2EE-based Web environments, after years of relying on third parties, Microsoft is now making available a free, downloadable Type-4 JDBC driver, which we used for our JSP Nile Throughput test.

Microsoft plans to announce a SQL server Web services toolkit for exposing stored procedures easily in .NET applications built in Visual Studio.NET. Microsoft Data Transformation Services currently let developers move data programmatically from one source to another as well as store and leverage metadata across systems and projects.

The future for SQL Server will undoubtedly include more integration with .NET. Today you still write business logic in stored procedures using Microsoft's Transact-SQL (T-SQL). The .NET vision will put business logic into separate components in a variety of programming languages. The included SQL Analyzer tool has an excellent set of templates for many kinds of T-SQL stored procedures, but SQL Server includes no Java support.

This DBMS does a good job of reaching out to databases on Unix and other platforms, but there's no getting around its reliance on Windows.