Microsoft ships SQL Server 'Shiloh' Beta 1

According to a report on NEWS.COM, Microsoft Corporation has released the first beta of SQL Server "Shiloh," the follow-up to SQL Server 7, to a small group of technical beta testers. Shiloh, Microsoft says, will be scalable and powerful enough for any e-commerce Web site.

"There are customers building [high-performance] Web sites today on SQL Server 7.0 and Windows NT 4," says Barry Goffe, the lead product manager for SQL Server 7. "Shiloh and Windows 2000 will offer major improvements and performance is not going to be an issue anymore."

Shiloh, which will probably be called SQL Server 7.5 or SQL Server 2000 when it ships in mid-2000, is being targeted at Web development, with new XML and Web URL address features leading the way. Improvements to the OLAP engine in Shiloh will all users to "slice and dice data over the Internet," according to Goffe.

Shiloh will also be the first version of SQL Server to feature an edition for Windows CE, the lightweight operating system that Microsoft targets at palm-sized and handheld devices. This completes the scalability puzzle for SQL Server, which already scales from mobile computers to multiprocessing Windows NT servers. A future version, code-named "Yukon," will offer additional size and speed improvements