Storage Engine Architecture

Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 scales to both large enterprise applications and laptop applications. This scalability is based on a completely new set of on-disk structures designed to handle applications for years to come. The new formats allow the server to scale from low-end to high-end systems to improve performance and manageability.

The benefits to the SQL Server 7.0 on-disk structures include:

• Improved scalability and integration with Windows NT Server.
• Better performance with larger I/O operations.
• Stable record locators to allow more indexes.
• More indexes to speed decision support queries.
• Simpler data structures to provide better quality.
• Greater extensibility, so that subsequent releases will have a cleaner development process and new features will be faster to implement.