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Microsoft has released a preview of two database products: the next SQL Server as well as a free trial of SQL Azure. The first is a chance to get your hands on pre-release code for the company's flagship offering in the database space; SQL Server 2008 R2 is the formal name for the newest iteration of the platform. SQL Azure is probably something more unfamiliar. It's a relational database built on its Azure platform for the cloud.

Google has launched several new additions to its enterprise version of Labs today. First and foremost, they've created a new tool that will let businesses compare any enterprise search engine with Google Search Appliance or Google Site Search. The software will then let you administer a anonymized and randomized test that users can vote on, letting you determine the quality of search results from different options.

The other announcements today are a new Google Search Appliance Connector for the Salesforce CRM, and the full launch of Google Apps Script for all Premier and Education Edition customers. Apps Script has been in a pilot since May but is now up to snuff for production environments.

CureCRM is new software as a service that aspires to be the "cure for the common CRM." As you might be able to tell from its logo, the service is first and foremost about integrating closely with email.

It acts as an email-based assistant for CRM work, and it can automatically log business-related email activity on both its own site and Salesforce.com. The product also focuses on including Twitter in the mix, making it a promising, if not entirely complete, addition to the social CRM space that is rapidly maturing in 2009.

Fluid is a simple application for creating site-specific browsers (SSBs) on your OSX desktop. Fluid definitely wasn't the first SSB project and was inspired primarily by the Mozilla Prism project.

The advantage with an SSB is that you can take almost any Web application you use heavily and get it out of your browser, reducing tab usage, avoiding crashes, and generally improving workflow. Fluid is really for anyone, but the low barrier to entry and the effect it has on productivity make it an attractive tool for getting things done. Though it's been around for a while, few businesses have really taken advantage of its full potential.

TwoTweet is a new shopping cart service that integrates closely with your Twitter account, using it to log in and letting your customers "reply to buy." While it's a cute idea for very small-scale ecommerce, relying on the unstable and insecure platform that is Twitter may be the dumbest business decision you ever make.

TwoTweet isn't designed to replace shopping carts for larger sites, since you can only sell one item at a time with the system. But even for very small businesses, this is a dangerous venture. It doesn't matter if you're selling t-shirts and the occasional album: allowing access to an ecommerce environment with your social network as an identity provider is a supremely bad idea.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, got its three millionth article in English tonight. The family of sites as a whole has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 languages, not counting discussion pages and other errata.

Wikipedia's millionth article was about a train station and the two millionth was on a Spanish TV show. This one is a biography of a Norwegian actress and director named Beate Eriksen. True to form, you can also find bios of Eriksen in about half a dozen other languages, and the article is changing rapidly due to all the attention.

Despite the unfortunate name, Doodle is a dead-simple Web app for scheduling a meeting. In our experience, scheduling meetings is a chore, with the most common method to be just emailing around to solicit advice. That's inefficient, and this single-purpose software as a service is one solution. Recently the service, which has been around since 2006 and is normally ad-supported, started offering premium accounts with greater customization and no advertising.

When Google Apps left beta back in July, Google announced that it would be adding a set of enterprise-specific features to make Premier Edition more attractive to businesses. Today Google has made good on that promise by supporting email retention and delegation for Apps customers.

Gmail is an awesome Web mail program, but it was missing some functionality essential for adoption in larger enterprises. One of those aspects was the ability for businesses to set company-wide retention policies in order to comply with regulatory requirements. Another one, the icing on the cake really, was email delegation that allows users to let others manage email for them.

Timing is everything. That's a saying that enterprise software giant Oracle has apparently not taken to heart, because today, in the middle of hysteria by both sides of the reform debate, the company has unveiled Oracle Revenue Management and Billing for Health Insurance.

A B2B vendor might not care to tiptoe around health IT issues, since they don't really depend on consumer opinion to gain customers. But Oracle is treading on dangerous ground by catering to the financial needs of insurers just when they're everyone's favorite target for vitriol.

The IBM PC, the machine that helped launch the original revolution in business computing, burst onto the scene 28 years ago today.

Though it was far from the first personal computer available for purchase, IBM's original 5150 model quickly became the gold standard for business computing, and helped to transform our notions of communication and collaboration forever.