In the Tuesday keynote, Microsoft Senior Vice President Paul Flessner announced that SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 will all ship the week of Nov. 7.  All

that's left is "fit and finish," said Thomas Rizzo, director, SQL Server product management, in a follow-up interview. He noted that once Microsoft publishes benchmarks, as it did on Tuesday, "we're close to the end" -- welcome news considering the product has been five years in the making. Microsoft said that, according to three TPC-H benchmarks, SQL Server 2005 (formerly known as Yukon) showed performance up to 162 percent higher than SQL Server 2000 and 38 percent higher than Oracle's best shot on comparable hardware. Numbers like that, along with improvements in manageability and integration with products including Visual Studio and Office, will make for a compelling business case, Rizzo says.