Management Studio
DMV 
CLR Interegation
Database mirroring

•	.NET Common Language Runtime integration: This 
means you can write stored procedures, functions, triggers, 
user-defined types, and even new aggregates in any .NET 
language. 
•	Native HTTP SOAP Access: This means that the 
database server can serve up data via Web Services with no 
additional middleware at all, not even an instance of IIS. 
•	New xml data type: You can store XML data natively 
in its own column type now. 
•	XQuery support: SQL Server supports XQuery for 
querying against XML data, including extensions that allow 
XML DDL operations. 
•	Improved Error Handling: T-SQL now supports TRY-
CATCH blocks for modern error handling. 
•	DDL Triggers: You can set up triggers that fire 
when CREATE, ALTER, or DROP statements are executed. 
•	Query Notifications: With query notifications, an 
external application can request the database engine to 
notify it when the data in a cached result set changes. 
This can dramatically lessen the load from requerying. 
•	Failover clustering now extends to 8 nodes on 32-
bit systems, and 4 nodes on 64-bit systems. 
•	Database mirroring introduces a new reliability 
model for hot standby on a database-by-database basis. 
•	Users now have acess to a database during a restore 
operation, within certain limits. This helps get you up and 
running faster after problems. 
•	Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS): SQL Server 2005 
introduces the ability for multiple statements to return 
result sets at the same time on a single connection.