SQL Server 7.0 has gone gold! SQL Server 7.0, the latest database server from Microsoft, will be available to resellers in late January or early February, according to reports. The product was officially unveiled at Fall Comdex in November, but Microsoft president Steve Ballmer said the company was waiting to hear back from its closest SQL Server customers before they sent it off for packaging. When word came back that all was well, Microsoft's next generation database server was deemed complete.
In the meantime, Microsoft's SQL Server team is actually working on a response to Larry Ellison's $1 million Oracle 8 challenge. Ellison said he would pay $1 million to anyone that could prove that SQL Server was less than 100 times as slow as Oracle's database. As you might expect, the benchmark is a bit skewed: the Oracle result was obtained on an $8 million 64-bit Sun system with over a terabyte of data.
For more information about SQL Server 7.0, please check out the SQL Server Web site
