Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 09/16/05 10:36

DA Morgan (damorgan@psoug.org) writes:
> I don't comment on products that are, as yet, unreleased.
>
> Until version 1.0 is officially released it does not exist.
> Any feature you see in Beta may or may not make it to the final.

One should keep in mind that the SQL 2005 beta is very late in the cycle.
The September CTP that was released this week is most likely the last
public drop before the whole thing launches Nov 7th.

It is highly unlikely that any features would be dropped at this point.
Keep in mind that there are quite a few installations out there, which
already are running SQL 2005 in production, both inside and outside
Microsoft. (What has happened though is that one feature, Database
mirroring, will only be for "evaluation" initially.)

> The one thing that fascinates me about the SQL Server community
> is that as a Beta tester for Oracle I am prevented by NDA from
> saying a word about what I see. You folks, on the other hand
> run around talking about it like you were signed on by the public
> relations department.

Guess what? Microsoft has NDAs as well, and when I first got access to
beta 1 two years ago I was under NDA. However, Microsoft did release
beta 1 publicly at PASS already in November 2003. Beta 2 was distributed
with MSDN. If you want to try it (OK, just joking :-), the latest CTP
is available on http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2005/productinfo/ctp.mspx.

> Scan comp.databases.ms-sqlserver and you find post after post
> about the Beta. Scan comp.databases.oracle.server and you will
> find hardly a peep about 10gR2 (now released) but not a single
> word about 11. Your is the only technology community I can think
> of that publishes books about vapourware: Quite amusing.

I would not call software that actually runs and is available to the
public "vaporware". Anyway, from a commercial point of view, it appears
to me that Microsoft is doing the right thing. By making betas of the
new product available early on, more people get to play it, learn it
and know it, and will thus be more inclined to deploy it early on.

Since I have never used any Oracle product, I have no experience of they
run their betas. I would be suprised though, if they never make any betas
publically available, as most software vendors appear to do that at some
point in the cycle.

--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/productdoc/2000/books.asp

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