Microsoft has revealed some of the changes in the forthcoming release of its SQL 2005 database, scheduled for later in the year.

The offering will include code checking tools dubbed Prefix and Prefast, which were developed by Microsoft laboratories to check automatically for common flaws like buffer overruns. Prefix examines code before the database is built and Prefast after compilation.

"This is all part of a strategy to educate platform developers about security," Detlef Echert, chief security advisor for Microsoft in Europe, told vnunet.com.

"While it will be possible to design systems without features like password protection built in, the default options will be more security conscious. A developer would have to go through several steps and make a conscious decision to write insecure code."

Other security enhancements include support for more encryption protocols than with the current product. It will also enable encryption of specific fields rather than just whole data sets.

Echert suggested that this feature will be particularly useful in medical systems, where by law different viewers must have different access rights.