Scalable and Robust RDBMS

Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 contains a number of features that makes it an excellent RDBMS for enterprise data warehouses and data marts, including:

• Support for terabyte-sized databases to manage the largest data warehouses.
• Scalability for large databases, but also for departmental servers and laptop computers with the 100 percent code-compatible Desktop Edition, providing the ultimate flexibility and access to central data sources.
• Advanced query processing to support the optimization and execution of complex queries typical in data warehouse applications, including star schemas.
• Intraquery parallelism to provide faster performance by breaking a complex single query into component parts and distributing the workload to multiple processors, including remotely linked servers.
• High-performance utilities to provide performance tuning, data loading, and index construction.
• Heterogeneous join capabilities to enable retrieval and consolidation of information from any OLE DB source.

SQL Server 7.0 is appropriate for nearly every data warehouse size and complexity. However, data warehouse implementations usually require more than one central database. In practice, organizations will implement decision support systems with additional analytical tools and with distributed information architectures. SQL Server 7.0 includes essential facilities for managing these additional tasks.