Katmai

What Does Katmai Mean?

Katmai is a code name for Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008. In May 2007, the Microsoft flagship database server version was announced and later released in August 2008. Microsoft’s Katmai is the 10th major version of this product, which was first introduced in 1989 by Microsoft and Sybase.

Katmai brought major innovations:

• Security
• Reliability/availability
• Performance
• Management
• Development enhancement
• Service brokering
• Data storage
• Data warehousing/extract, transform load
• Reporting

In April 2010, Katmai was replaced by Kilimanjaro, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.

Techopedia Explains Katmai

Katmai’s main innovation promised new capabilities for storing, indexing and accessing semi-structured and unstructured native data. Traditionally, relational databases, such as SQL Server, were optimized to store textual and numerical data in various hierarchical organizational structures, also called schemes or models.

The advent and access of rich media content has created a greater demand for the reliable storage of audio, video, graphical and geographical information. Thus, Microsoft has responded with the introduction of new native Katmai data types, such as FILESTREAM, which optimizes overall database response by storing structural metadata within the database and file content within the file system.

The GEOGRAPHY and GEOMETRY data types (for planar and round-earth spatial data, respectively) come with several dozen new methods, which conform to the Open Geospatial Consortium’s simple feature access for SQL version 1.1.

Other key innovations include the full-text search option and a resource governor, which allows for the reservation of resources for certain users or workflows.