What are advantages of SQL 2000 over SQl 7.0?

1)User-Defined Functions: The User-Defined Functions (UDFs) -- one or moreTransact-SQL statements may be used to encapsulate the code for reuse. The Userdefinedfunctions cannot make a permanent change to the data or modifythe database tables. The UDF can change only the local objects for a UDF, like local cursors or variables.

2)Distributed Partitioned Views: The Distributed partitioned views allow you topartition the tables horizontally across the multiple servers. Therefore, you can scale out onedatabase server to a group of database servers that cooperate to provide thesame performance levels as a cluster of database servers. Due to the distributed partitioned views, the SQL Server 2000 now on the first place in the tpc-c tests.

3)New Data Types: This include: bigint, sql_variant,an 8-byte integer type;  a data type that allows the storage of data of different data types; and the table  data type, which allows all applications to store the results temporarily for later use.

4)INSTEAD OF and AFTER Triggers: There are INSTEAD OF & AFTER Triggers in the SQL Server 2000. INSTEAD  triggers are executed instead of the INSERT,DELETE , UPDATE or triggering action. AFTER triggers are executed after the triggering action.

5)Cascading Referential Integrity Constraints: These are new ON DELETE & ON UPDATE clauses in the REFERENCES clause of the CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE statements. The ON DELETE clause controls what actions are taken if you attempt to delete a row to that existing foreign keys point. The ON UPDATE clause defines the actions that are taken if you attempt to update a candidate key value to which existing foreign keys point.

The ON DELETE and ON UPDATE clauses have 2 options:

NO ACTION :-The NO ACTION specifies that the deletion/update fail with an error.

CASCADE :-The CASCADE specifies that all the rows with foreign keys pointing to the deleted/updated row are also deleted and updated.

6)32 CPU and 64GB Memory Support: The SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition running under the Windows 2000 DataCenter can support up to 32 CPUs and up to 64GB of physical memory (RAM) on a computer.

7)XML Support: The SQL Server 2000 can use XML to insert,  delete, and update values in the database, and the database engine can return data as in the Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents.