The second keynote of the day was on data: Yukon, Reporting Services, and WinFS (the longhorn file system). Yukon First:

The next release of SQL Server has many new features. Obviously, web services are integrated right in. There is an "HTTP Endpoint" object that will wrap a stored procedure as a web service. That service then can be consumed by any client without interrogating the schema directly.

Reporting services were supposed to come out with Yukon but it will come out sooner than that (it is in beta now). They ate their own dog food: it is written entirely in C# and ASP.Net. I plan to play with this a bit: it would have saved me a lot of time on my last project when it came to reporting.

The new SQL tool is called the workbench; this is basically Enterprise Manager, Query Analyzer, and the other SQL tools on one UI. They have also added a GUI wrapper on their SP editor. You don’t have to type the input parameter syntax because now it is in a grid (a big deal, I guess).

Yukon is supposed to have structured exception handling now, something I plan to look into in the upcoming sessions. You can also debug from calling code into SQL code (e.g. from C# into the SP called by C#). That should be sweet.

TSQL also understands embedded XQuery along with a new XML datatype. Thus way, you can assign a SQL variable the result of an XQuery on an XML typed value.

WinFS sits on top of NTFS and is not, as many think, driven from SQL Server. They have too much invested in the NTFS code base to change it all now. However, there is an extended metadata store, built on a "relational engine" (no details yet on ust what that means), for extended attributes used by WinFS and Longhorn. This also supports natural language searches which look neat (but they used a trivial example so who knows how neat it really is).

I’m off to more Yukon sessions now.