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Microsoft starts from behind with its own technology

In a strange bit of irony, Microsoft 's database rivals supported its Common Language Runtime engine for stored procedures even before the company provided the CLR capabilities itself with the November release of SQL Server 2005.

Les King, program director of DB2 marketing at IBM , said his company was first out of the gate with support for CLR stored procedures two years ago. Oracle followed suit this year as part of its 10g Release 2 database. In both cases, the CLR support is available only when users run their databases on Windows servers.

But despite running behind, Microsoft claims that it will have the upper hand because its implementation of the CLR is built inside the process that manages all the resources for SQL Server 2005.