We are especially interested in:

1) XML for Electronic Patient Record project to pass data
from one hospital to another with differing IT setups.

2) Improvements in Analysis Services to create better
OLAP Service cubes

3) Data Mining sounds cool!

Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Administrator's Companion
ISBN 0-7356-1051-7

is worth reading!
Andrew

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Chris Thibodeaux at 1/8/01 1:19:11 PM

Shelley -
There are several appealing items in SQL2000 which make the whole DB engine much more robust. Here are my suggestions for Management to Consider:

1. Native Support for XML (leaner file transporation across the network)
2. Support for Cascading Delete's (handled by DRI, not programmatical anymore).
3. Federated Database Servers for SQL Clusters (Major Scalability)
4. User Defined Functions (great for helper objects to the COM components)
5. Indexed Views
6. New Datatypes BIGINT, TABLE, and SQL_Variant
7. Better security within NT/200 using Kerberos
8. Log Shipping
9. T-SQL Debugger within ISQL
10. Major enhancements in Query Processor, Replication Engine, Olap Services and Full-text indexing.
11. Multi-Instance Interfaces on single Machine.
12. Distributed Partitioned Views
13. etc.....

I have taken many clients from 7.0 to 2000 and haven't had any problems, as I did when converting SQL 6.5 to 7.0. The enhancements in 2000 are certainly geared strongly towards better up-time with leaner memory/processor utilization and the clustering interaction is a viable reason to upgrade in itself.

HTH -
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Shelley at 1/5/01 1:47:18 PM

I need some strong points for the management to convince them to upgrade to sql2000 now than waiting for 6 months.
We are currently in process of developing this new product. All development is on sql7. I want to upgrade our database to sql2000 now rather than waiting after the release which might be in another 3 months.