Mark Townsend, senior director of product development at Oracle Corp., estimated that no more than 30 percent of the developers who write code for his company's databases use Java to build stored procedures.

And most of the IT managers who responded to the informal Computerworld survey indicated that the Java capabilities have done little to change the way their shops program to Oracle and IBM databases.

"There's a perception -- accurate or not -- that a [Java virtual machine] operating in the database slows the database down and makes it more resource-hungry," said James Brockman, a developer at the Missouri Department of Insurance. "DBAs in particular are unpersuaded by arguments from developers that using Java everywhere would help their productivity or mean one less learning curve to climb. They don't understand Java, so developers are not allowed to use it."

Microsoft users may be more likely to want to take advantage of the company's new programming options, said Gartner Inc. analyst Mark Driver. He noted that it isn't unusual in the Microsoft world to find a developer working on the user interface as well as the business and database logic, whereas in Oracle environments, database developers tend to focus only on database code.

Yet Driver doesn't expect the ability to write stored procedures in languages like Visual Basic to be the driving factor that gets IT managers to upgrade to SQL Server 2005. "Most of the energy and excitement around SQL Server is around scalability and the database engine," he said.