Is anyone planning to offer SQL 2005 as part of their hosting? If you do, are you upgrading a SQL Server 2000 box or setting up a new box seperately?

The product launches this month and offers some pretty impressive features including user defined T-SQL functions written in .NET code! It has PIVOT tables, common table expressions and even an OUTPUT statement for UPDATE, DELETE and INSERT statements. (So no longer do you have to select the items to update / insert to display them to the user before you run a seperate UPDATE statement)

It ties in very nicely to Visual Studio 2005 although I'm not sure how useful that will be in a hosted environment.

Security has been improved (although SQL 2000 wasn't that bad in my opinion) and all these new features tie in nicely with current logins and roles.

We will be and I would assume it will be on a new box and not an upgrade. Just the thought of upgrading sounds scary in a live environment

It does sound pretty impressive. I think I watched something on this recently also and the performance increases over SQL 2000.