SQL Server 2005 brings new features, higher price

The long-awaited upgrade to Microsoft's SQL Server database will come with a raft of new features when it ships later this year - as well as a price hike of up to 25%, Microsoft said on Thursday. The company also announced a new version of the product for smaller businesses.

The Enterprise Edition of SQL Server 2005, formerly known by its Yukon codename, will have a list price of $24,999 per processor, or $13,499 for a server and 25 user licenses. That's up from $19,999 per processor, or $11,099 for a server and 25 user licenses, for the equivalent version of SQL Server 2000. The Standard Edition also carries a higher price tag.

Microsoft said the increase is justified by new features in the product, which marks the first big overhaul for SQL Server in five years. The Enterprise Edition carries several capabilities that are new to Microsoft, including partitioning, which can be used to improve database performance, and mirroring, for creating a back-up database to increase the availability of applications.

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The long-awaited upgrade to Microsoft's SQL Server database will come with a raft of new features when it ships later this year - as well as a price hike of up to 25%, Microsoft said on Thursday. The company also announced a new version of the product for smaller businesses.

The Enterprise Edition of SQL Server 2005, formerly known by its Yukon codename, will have a list price of $24,999 per processor, or $13,499 for a server and 25 user licenses. That's up from $19,999 per processor, or $11,099 for a server and 25 user licenses, for the equivalent version of SQL Server 2000. The Standard Edition also carries a higher price tag.

Microsoft said the increase is justified by new features in the product, which marks the first big overhaul for SQL Server in five years. The Enterprise Edition carries several capabilities that are new to Microsoft, including partitioning, which can be used to improve database performance, and mirroring, for creating a back-up database to increase the availability of applications.

"For the added value customers get, we think the price increase is not that high," said Tom Rizzo, director of product management for SQL Server.

Microsoft has said it will not charge customers extra to run the database on multicore processors, Rizzo noted. By contrast, Oracle and IBM require customers to buy a separate database license for each processor core. And Microsoft includes features such as partitioning and mirroring as standard, he said, while its rivals typically price them separately.

Paul Kirby, senior research director with AMR Research in Boston, said the price increases do not seem unreasonable, largely because of the extras Microsoft includes. Reporting Services, a tool for collecting and analyzing data that was introduced with SQL Server 2000, remains a part of the product and is useful to a lot of customers, he said.

"They're still going to significantly underprice IBM and Oracle," Kirby said.

Microsoft also unveiled a new version of SQL Server on Thursday called Workgroup Edition, aimed at departments and smaller businesses. Limited to two-processor servers and 3G bytes of RAM, it is aimed at customers who had been asking for a no-frills version of SQL Server database at a low price, Rizzo said. Priced at $3,899 per processor, or $739 for a server and five user licenses, it has no reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP) or business intelligence features but does do back-up log shipping, he said.

The Workgroup Edition appears similar to Oracle's Standard Edition One and IBM's DB2 Express products, both of which are recently launched low-end databases for two-processor servers. Oracle, in particular, has been gunning for Microsoft's customers and has boasted that Standard Edition One was cheaper than SQL Server.

AMR's Kirby said the product may be of most appeal to value-added resellers who were looking for a product with more functionality than Microsoft Database Engine (MSDE) - a bare-bones database that Microsoft offers for free - and yet cheaper than SQL Server Standard Edition.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.