SAN FRANCISCO — Microsoft showed off some of the forthcoming programmability features of "Yukon," the next version of its SQL Server database, here at the VSLive! developer conference on Thursday.

David Campbell, Microsoft product unit manager for the SQL Server Engine, talked up a number of the new capabilities Microsoft is building into its major database upgrade that industry watchers expect the company to ship some time next year. A first beta of Yukon is expected to hit around mid-year, possibly at Microsoft's Tech Ed 2003 show in Dallas in early June.

Campbell highlighted Yukon's Common Language Runtime (CLR) integration, built-in Web services support, new messaging features, support for new datatypes and general scalability and availability advances.

Campbell characterized Yukon as a "fourth generation" database that is optimized to provide "autonomous computing." Microsoft executives have used the autonomous computing label to describe interactions between computers that don't trust each other.

"The challenge is programming against moving bits," Campbell told attendees, or generating queries across streaming data. Yukon will go a long way towards meeting this challenge, he said.

Yukon won't be an XML database, but will rather integrate support for XML data types into the relational SQL Server database.

Yukon also will be tightly integrated with Microsoft's Visual Studio .Net development suite, Campbell said. That way, database programmers will have access to Visual Studio's authoring, debugging, profiling and IntelliSense capabilities. In addition, Microsoft is building Visual SourceSafe configuration management product right into the database – a move that was met with resounding applause by developers at the VSLive! conference.

Microsoft announced yesterday that it is building reporting services right into Yukon, as well.

Campbell played up the connection between Web services and Yukon. He told attendees that Yukon will be able to directly host Web services and, specifically, that stored procedures will be able to stored as Web services.

"Yukon is a great Web services engine," Campbell noted.

Campbell spent a considerable portion of his hour-and-a-half presentation detailing the philosophy behind Yukon.

Rather than putting all of its database horsepower on one, large monolithic machine, Microsoft is continuing its campaign to distribute databases across multiple systems, Campbell said.

Microsoft is designing Yukon to be the ideal autonomous computing cell (ACC) database. "Service centers," or database-centric applications, are built using ACCs, Campbell said.

In Microsoft's vision, service centers use lots of "bricks," Campbell explained, with bricks being defined as computing units consisting of lots of cheap memory, disk and CPU processing power. And service centers can have many database engines running simultaneously, he continued.

Microsoft is building Yukon around these concepts, he said.

Microsoft is also demonstrating Yukon to select customers and partners at a private event on the Microsoft campus this week. One attendee who requested anonymity said Microsoft said not to expect the first Yukon beta until mid-year, as repairing damage done by the SQL Slammer worm earlier this year has consumed most of the SQL development team.