Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Bible

SQL Server History

SQL Server has grown considerably over the past two decades from its early roots with Sybase.

In 1989, Microsoft, Sybase, and Ashton-Tate jointly released SQL Server 1.0. The product was based on Sybase SQL Server 3.0 for UNIX and VMS.

SQL Server 4.2.1 for Windows NT released in 1993. Microsoft began making changes to the code.

SQL Server 6.0 (code named SQL 95) released in 1995. In 1996, the 6.5 upgrade (Hydra) was released in 1996. It included the first version of Enterprise Manager (StarFighter I) and SQL Server Agent (StarFighter II.)

SQL Server 7.0 (Sphinx), released in 1999 and was a full rewrite of the database engine by Microsoft. From a code sense, this was the first Microsoft SQL Server. SQL Server 7 also included English Query (Argo), OLAP Services (Plato), Replication, Database Design and Query tools (DaVinci), and Full-Text Search (aptly code named Babylon). Data Transformation Services (DTS) was introduced.

SQL Server 2000 (Shiloh) 32-bit, version 8, introduced SQL Server to the enterprise with clustering, better performance, and OLAP. It supported XML through three different XML add-on packs. It added user-defined functions, indexed views, clustering support, OLAP, Distributed Partition Views, and improved Replication. SQL Server 2000 64-bit version for Intel Itanium (Liberty) released in 2003, along with the first version of Reporting Services (Rosetta) and Data Mining tools (Aurum). DTS becomes powerful and gained in popularity. Northwind joined ...