Microsoft's next version of SQL Server, code-named Yukon, is aimed
at pushing its way further into the enterprise realm.
Stan Sorenson, director of server marketing at Microsoft, said that
Microsoft expected to issue the first beta version of Yukon in the
second quarter of 2002, and to make the final version generally
available in the first half of 2003.
The forthcoming Yukon will focus on native support of XML within
the database, tighter integration with Microsoft's Visual Studio
toolbox, and enabling Web services via the inclusion of the .net
Framework and support for the Common Language Runtime. This enables
the database to work with more than 20 non-Microsoft programming
languages.
Microsoft's current SQL Server still has to convince many that it
is right for every enterprise-level job.
"We see few Global 2000 companies running their company on
[Microsoft's] operating system and database. But that doesn't mean
that in two or three years we won't see Intel technology move into
the data centre," said Mark Shainman, senior research analyst at
The Meta Group.
Shainman believed Yukon served as a purposeful first step towards
establishing Microsoft in the enterprise space, but that the
product would need help from other technologies to achieve
this.
"The limitation has never been in the [database management system]
itself. It is really the scalability and robustness of the
operating system layer it runs on," Shainman said.
With the introduction of Windows 2000 early last year, providing
support for as many as eight processors, SQL Server saw a
significant jump in performance.
"The greatest hindrance to Microsoft moving into corporate data
centres is not going to be technology, but process. The reality is
that IBM and Oracle can give you road maps and processes on how to
run a particular version of their database on a given operating
system, hardware platform and in a highly available 24-by-7
mission-critical environment. A lot of those skill sets and
processes are not there yet for Microsoft environments," Shainman
said.
Microsoft's user base is not as technology-savvy as those charged
with running and administering Oracle and IBM databases either,
said Philip Russom, an independent industry analyst.
Russom said that in some organisations, a close inspection of the
infrastructure would yield the simple fact that a given company is
running its SQL Server database on the same piece of hardware that
it is running other applications, such as Microsoft Exchange.
"Part of making a database scale up can be with best practices.
Scalability can be achieved when best practices are applied,"
Russom said.
SQL Server users all too often conform to a set of worst practices,
such as making changes in live production environments rather than
in test beds first, Russom added.
Internal research by Microsoft proved that customers adhering to a
set of best practices achieved as much as a 10-times greater
availability than customers who failed to strictly follow the best
practices.
So when Microsoft released Datacenter Server, its highest-end
server, the company decided to sell only to OEMs, who would then
offer Datacenter in a pre-packaged, pre-tested configuration.
Microsoft has caught on in the enterprise. A recent report from
Boston-based AMR Research showed that Oracle had 50% of the market
for running enterprise resource planning applications, while
Microsoft filled the second spot with 21% of the market. IBM
slipped from 18% to 15%.