Hi,

Does PMF 5.0.x require that the SQL server version be 2005 as compared to 2000?

Or can we upgrade to PMF 5 w/ SQL 2000 and upgrade to SQL 2005 in a phased approach?

Are there any PMF benefits to using SQL 2005?

Thanks,
Rick

PMF works with SQL Server 2000 or later.

PMF was designed to be an "RDBMS-agnostic framework." So there are no PMF-specific benefits to using SQL 2005.

If you have an existing PMF data mart you can simply run the migration scripts to get the mart up to v5, and these work regardless of the SQL Server version you're using. Once you're on v5, by the way, future upgrade migrations become autonomic - pmf will offer to auto-migrate a mart when you attach to it, log in and view the PMF administrator dashboard.

However, from a platform perspective, Microsoft's performance improvements in SQL 2005 do speed reporting retrieval if they're tuned right and so will affect performance. One tip to ensure top performance is to turn off automatic cursor management in SQL 2005 - this is a legacy feature that slows things down considerably.

The only "SQL 2005" event that's new with PMF v5 was that we *finally* stopped shipping SQL 2000 demo backups. That really only affects IBI sales engineers, not customers. And new technology is being built into PMF 5.1.1 to automatically build demos on any RDBMS on any platform from our original demos in SQL 2005 anyway. This is based on technology we built that lets anyone back their mart up to a temporary set of files, then deploy it to another RDBMS server or even another RDBMS and platform.

Hope this helps