Content Summary : Looking At Microsoft SQL Server Like Oracle, DB2, Informix, Sybase and other relational SQL database applications, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 is meant to do one thing and one thing only – store and retrieve data - quickly. We’ve chosen to look at SQL Server 2000 for the purposes of this white paper because it is an industry-standard database supported by highly skilled programmers and analysts. SQL Server 2000 provides rich XML and Internet standard support that gives you the ability to store and retrieve data in XML format easily with built-in stored procedures. You can also use HTTP to send queries to the database, perform full-text search on documents stored in database, and run queries over the Web with natural language rather than writing SQL statements. SQL Server 2000 is highly scalable and reliable and can meet the needs of demanding ecommerce and enterprise applications. SQL Server 2000 takes advantage of symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) systems and can use up to 32 processors and 64 GB of RAM. SQL Server 2000 can distribute the database and data load across servers, and features failover clustering, log shipping, and new backup strategies. Because of this scalability, SQL Server 2000 is suitable for Very Large Databases (VLDB) in the millions or hundreds of millions of rows of data. Beyond the hardware scalability, each SQL Server 2000 database can have 2,147,483,647 objects (tables, columns, stored procedures, users, etc.) and each instance of SQL Server can have up to 32,767 databases, and there can be up to 16 instances of SQL Server can be running per server.