The balance could get particularly delicate for companies such as Northrop Grumman that are moving to service-oriented architectures. The SOA approach encourages the separation of application-specific business logic into a different tier from databases. But the new capabilities in SQL Server 2005 may entice some IT shops to consider shifting business logic to the database, said Forrester Research Inc. analyst Carl Zetie.

Zetie said he worries about the prospect of users "backsliding into entangled code" after having spent a considerable amount of time layering their systems.

Andrew Brust, co-author of the upcoming book Programming Microsoft SQL Server 2005, said the CLR will be best reserved for two database programming scenarios: creating aggregate functions, in which numeric data from a series of separate data records is calculated or collected; and defining custom data types where data values might have different interpretations or expressions, such as a calendar-year quarter vs. a fiscal-year quarter.

But those aren't typical bread-and-butter data manipulation and retrieval uses, added Brust, who is chief of new technology at Citigate Hudson Inc., a New York-based Microsoft business partner that specializes in development of business intelligence applications. T-SQL will remain the better choice in those scenarios because it's optimized for testing, retrieving and changing large sets of data, Brust said.

Microsoft said that in SQL Server 2005, it has improved T-SQL's exception-handling capabilities and added a set of relational operators and query-language extensions. Those are designed to better align it with the SQL:2003 standard and to enable users to navigate hierarchical relationships in a table, handle large data values and pivot data.