Microsoft has released a second free service pack for its popular SQL Server 2005 database application. The update makes SQL Server 2005 compatible with Microsoft’s new Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007 suite, and adds a number of data compression, manageability and interoperability enhancements. Microsoft has also changed the terms under which SQL Server 2005 can be run using virtualisation software.
but iam unable to use a Sql 2005 express “user instance” via Web developer express as a non-admin on xp.
this forces me to be a member of the administrator group…
It seems thusfar that the developer experience on Windows (even with only microsoft tools) is still pretty much admin-only. I just found this out with VS2005.
The major change in this release has been Common Criteria support for EAL4 security controls.
What this means is that SQL Server now supports Residual Information Protection (erasing memory before the memory is allocated to a new resource), proper login statistics and auditing (like Oracle has had for years), and Column GRANT should not override table DENY.
This is one of the few products Microsoft puts out which has consistently tried to do better in terms of security and reliability. It is a completely different product than SQL Server 2000 in that regard.
When you integrate it with Active Directory and IIS 6.0, you actually have support for very fine-grained authorization, authentication, and accounting. That is, if you do it right and plan it accordingly. There’s a significant amount of infrastructure that your average ASP.NET app does not touch within SQL Server 2005, .NET 2.0, and IIS 6.
Oracle has this also, but will charge you an arm and a leg for Oracle Advanced Security or Oracle Single Sign On.
You can also build this in WebLogic, but again, you will be charged an arm and a leg by BEA.
You can build this in Apache/(Linux/BSD/Solaris)/Kerberos/Java/PHP as well, and save a lot of money. However, there’s a lot of corporate apps out there that run .NET.
Again, Microsoft has put out a decent database server product and updated it with new features without gouging the customers like Oracle
.