Microsoft SQL Server version 6.5 has been enhanced to meet the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) SQL-92 standards and has been certified as compliant with Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS 127-2) established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
SQL Server 6.5 includes new SQL Distributed Management Objects (SQL-DMO) objects — Transfer, BulkCopy, ServerGroup, and RegisteredServer — and enhances the functionality of existing SQL-DMO objects.
Some SQL-DMO objects now support ConnectionPoint events, which allow you to write Component Object Model (COM) objects that are notified by SQL-DMO objects when certain events occur. SQL Server 6.5 includes new OLE Automation stored procedure support, which allows you to write an extended stored procedure with Microsoft® Visual Basic®.
The ODBC SQL Server Driver in SQL Server 6.5 now includes:
The backup and recovery capabilities managed by SQL Enterprise Manager have been enhanced, which means that individual tables can be backed up and restored; transaction logs can be recovered through a specified date and time; a transaction history is maintained about backups from a particular database; and greater options are now provided in the Database Backup/Restore dialog box. Enhancements have been made to the SQL Server replication capabilities, especially to text and image data types. Also, SQL Server 6.5 allows you to tune performance of systems containing four or more processors by assigning thread execution to specific processors, thus minimizing the overhead incurred by threads switching between multiple processors.