I've heard that BCM v2 is done and tested with the MSDE SP4 and that
MSDE SP4 is "mere" weeks away from shipping.
BCM v2 is much faster than v1 in many operations. And I don't think its
the case that MSDE performace has improved between service packs. I
think the BCM team has put more effort into optimizing their code and
design in v2.
However, performance is not only about BCM code. On some machines
performance improves tremendously when anti-virus software is turned
off because MSDE uses files extensively and various releases of
anti-virus file checkers have been inefficient (buggy). On other
machines additional memory (avoiding paging) can make a big difference.
SQL Express 2005 (AKA Yukon) has been in beta for years and its release
date is hard to determine with confidence. I expect that shipping bcmv2
with SQL Express would also require another round of BCM beta testing,
further delaying getting it into users' hands.
Yukon will ship with the next release of Microsoft programming tools,
Whidbey (Visual Studio 2005 ?). The latest beta of Whidbey/Yukon that I
installed wasn't fully baked. For example the new ADO, the layer of
software that connects applications to Yukon, behaved differently when
I rebuilt my MSDE apps with it; i.e. some features broke.
I expect Whidbey and Yukon will ship later this year, then bcm v3 can
be built on that platform, and will probably be delivered with the next
release of Outlook/Office.