Microsoft SQL Server (2008)
SQL Server 2008, formerly codenamed Katmai, was released on August 6, 2008 and goals to make data self organizing, management self-tuning, and self maintaining with the improvement of SQL Server Always On technologies, to give almost-zero downtime. SQL Server 2008 also includes support for structured and semi-structured data, as well as digital media formats for pictures, audio, video and other multimedia data. In present versions, such multimedia data can be saved as BLOBs (binary large objects), but they are generic bit streams. It also natively supports hierarchical data, and includes T-SQL constructs to directly deal with them, without using recursive queries. Basic awareness of multimedia data will permit specialized functions to be performed on them. According to Paul Flessner, senior Vice President, Server Applications, Microsoft Corp., SQL Server 2008 can be a data storage backend for different varieties of data:
XML, email, time/calendar, file, document, spatial, etc as well as perform search, query, analysis, sharing, and synchronization across all data types.