This is what we probably would have called "Beta 3" if we could just standardize our naming conventions and stick with them for once in our lives. I swear… I have no idea why we do this to our customers.
Windows 95. Windows ME. Windows 2000. Windows XP.
SQL 7.0. SQL 2000. SQL "Yukon". SQL 2005 Beta 2. SQL 2005 CTP June.
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SQL Server 2005 June CTP. We released the first public CTP for SQL Server 2005. The SQL Server 2005 June CTP is feature complete, and we encourage you to download this version as a great start your evaluation of the product.
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/2005/productinfo/ctp.mspx
SQL Server 2005 benchmarks. We also announced the first TPC benchmark results for SQL Server 2005 with HP, NEC Corp. and Bull. These companies are leading the way in demonstrating the performance that SQL Server 2005 will provide. Although the tests were conducted using early builds of SQL Server 2005, the results are indicative of the scalability and cost effectiveness you can expect to experience with SQL Server 2005. In three TPC-H benchmarks, SQL Server 2005 had up to 162 percent higher performance than SQL Server 2000 and 38 percent higher performance than Oracle’s best result on a 16-processor Intel® Itanium® 2 server at a cost that is 20 percent less per query. In addition, HP also posted a TPC-C result on SQL Server 2005 that is the highest TPC-C result ever for Windows, beating the one million transaction-per-minute mark. The result had 7 percent better performance and cost 37 percent less per transaction than Oracle’s best result on a 64-processor Intel® Itanium® 2 server. The benchmark information is available at http://www.tpc.org/ .
Kurt Shintaku's Blog 