It’s official! The countdown to SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk 2006 has begun. All three products will be launched officially on the week of November 7th, 2005 (yes, 2005!). You can go to http://msdn.microsoft.com/launch2005 for more information. During Paul Flessner’s keynote speech this morning, he announced the launch date and that you can now download the latest CTP (Community Technology Preview) on MSDN or betaplace. The latest CTP is feature complete and is the equivalent of Beta 3 for SQL Server. From here forward, you should be able to upgrade from CTP to CTP without having to uninstall and reinstall.

Other big news in this mornings keynote was that Reporting Services will be shipped in all releases other than SQL Express. Also, the ad-hoc reporting tool called Report Builder will be shipped with Standard Edition as well. Previously this was only in Enterprise Edition.

New SQL Server 2005 benchmarks were also announced this morning. In the coveted TPC-C benchmark, SQL Server 2005 has experienced a 17% lower cost and 37% better performance over SQL Server 2000. In the TPC-H benchmark, which is more applicable to data warehouses, SQL Server experienced 162% better performance and 54% lower cost. In the constant Oracle vs. SQL Server battle, SQL Server had 7% better performance and 37% lower cost than Oracle in the TPC-C benchmark. In the TPC-H there was a 35% better performance and 20% lower cost to Oracle. In other news, Paul Flessner mentioned the SQL Server Migration Assistant, which allows you to migrate easily from Oracle. The conversion kit simplifies the manual effort of the conversion by 80% or more.

I went to many more sessions today but the most compelling was Visual Studio 2005 Team Services. This will have to be a huge series of articles, as it’s a huge feature. Essentially, Microsoft now performs all the change management, testing, test-driven development and load testing for you based on your role. My mouth was open half the presentation thinking “Wow!”.