Nice cut and paste jobbie from MSDN, ever heard of plagiarism? I avoid Microsoft technical documentation for good reason, namely that they find it impossible to write human readable documentation. I wish I'd avoided this article too. Jeff, you'd be better off linking directly to SQL 2005 Books Online, this is all lifted from there.

But apart from being pissed off that you're low enough to try and pass this work off as your own, my actual beef is:

"It is evident from the comparison [to SQL 7 and SQL 2000 improvements]; there is a huge new list of features that is included in SQL 2005"

Being able to store lots of data in a single column, that's huge [SQL 7]. Being able to pump XML straight into your SQL so you can insert it, that's huge [SQL 2000]. Where's the big bang of SQL 2005?

You've listed a bunch of small audience tweaks, not major improvements. What I was hoping for from this article, and which it spectactularly failed to deliver, was some real life examples of how SQL2005 was making life easier.

I've not had that much of a look at 2005, most of our clients are still on 2000. But so far I've been disappointed. First impression was, it had a clunky GUI that somehow was actually worse than enterprise manager. It just served as an advert to not develop large applications in .Net.