Following months of beta tests and public demonstrations, Microsoft has launched its Visual Studio 2005 suite for software developers and its SQL Server 2005 database software, delivering new data integration and collaborative capabilities.

The most significant changes come in SQL Server 2005's integration services, which deliver much of the functionality of standalone extract, transform and load (ETL) tools.

"SQL Server 2005 is a very impressive piece of software," said Colin Bird, chief technology officer of IT consultancy Conchango. "Informatica, the market leader in ETL, will be hard pressed to keep up, both from feature and functionality and from a commercial point of view."

Philip Dawson of analyst Gartner said the new scalability and availability features are much needed. "Some of this has been done to counter what Oracle has done with RAC [clustering] and 10g, although Microsoft is still somewhat behind Oracle in these capabilities," he said. "Now Microsoft needs to focus on the admin tools."

Meanwhile, new features in Visual Studio 2005 bring the development suite in line with Borland, its main commercial rival.

Bird said that Microsoft still has catching up to do but its tools will probably provide greater advantages in the long term.