SQL Server 2008, formerly codenamed Katmai, was released on August 6, 2008 and goals to make data self organizing, management self-tuning, and self maintaining with the improvement of SQL Server Always On technologies, to give almost-zero downtime. SQL Server 2008 also includes support for structured and semi-structured data, as well as digital media formats for pictures, audio, video and other multimedia data. In present versions, such multimedia data can be saved as BLOBs (binary large objects), but they are generic bit streams. It also natively supports hierarchical data, and includes T-SQL constructs to directly deal with them, without using recursive queries. Basic awareness of multimedia data will permit specialized functions to be performed on them. According to Paul Flessner, senior Vice President, Server Applications, Microsoft Corp., SQL Server 2008 can be a data storage backend for different varieties of data: XML, email, time/calendar, file, document, spatial, etc as well as perform search, query, analysis, sharing, and synchronization across all data types.
Microsoft Office is an office suite of desktop applications, servers and services, released by Microsoft on August 1, 1989 for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Originally, the first version of Microsoft Office contained Microsoft Word, a word processor and was previously considered the main program in Office; Microsoft Excel, a spreadsheet program that originally competed with the dominant Lotus 1-2-3; and Microsoft PowerPoint, a popular presentation program for Windows and Mac.; a marketing term for a bundled set of applications. As years passed by, Office applications have grown significantly closer with shared features such as a common spell checker, Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) data integration and Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications scripting language. Microsoft also positions Office as a development platform for line-of-business software under the Office Business Applications brand. The current versions are Office 2010 for Windows, released on June 15, 2010; and Office 2011 for Mac OS X, released October 26, 2010.The new Office 2013 (version 15 of the Office suite) is reported to be released around December 2012.