Microsoft has acknowledged in the past that the tricky integration of the two products was one reason SQL Server is coming out now two years late. But, said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, it is also why SQL Server is now much more scalable, secure and efficient to deploy -- and why IT managers and developers will find 'the whole greater than the sum of these products'.

'There is no mission-critical enterprise job of any form that you shouldn't feel confident running today on the Microsoft platform,' Ballmer said.

Besides touting big-name customers, Ballmer also brought out Intel Corp. CEO Paul Otellini, who introduced powerful enterprise server hardware using multiple 64-bit Intel Itanium processors that can run SQL Server 2005.

Another key Microsoft partner, SAP AG, has more than 20,000 customer companies running SAP applications on top of SQL Server, said Ballmer. That includes one that had more than 93,000 concurrent users.

Not present at Microsoft's launch was Oracle Corp., whose market-leading Oracle 10g database has the most to lose if SQL Server 2005 can catch on with more big companies. Microsoft is offering a discount of 50 percent off list price to new SQL Server 2005 customers that switch from Oracle within a year.