After five years of waiting, users will finally get
their hands on a completely new version of Microsoft's database
product when SQL Server 2005 and a new database management system
(DBMS) are released next week.
SQL Server 2005 includes features such as database mirroring,
XML integration, online indexing, automatic database tuning and
full text search. It will also have enhanced business intelligence,
online analytical programming (Olap), data mining and reporting
tools.
SQL Server was introduced 12 years ago, when it was seen as a
workgroup database and used extensively for small applications.
Over the years it has matured to become an enterprise database
management system supporting medium and large deployments.
Some experts feel that because SQL Server has gradually matured,
with no radical overhaul, users have not benefited from the
breakthroughs in technology to the same degree as those using rival
products, especially in areas such as high-end performance. Over
the past five years Oracle has released two major versions (9i and
10g), and IBM has rolled out a series of DB2 8.x releases.
But SQL Server has gained the support of analyst due to its
reputation of being the easiest enterprise DBMS to manage, and
tends to be less expensive than Oracle, IBM and Sybase. In
addition, most SQL Server deployments are for small to medium-sized
database applications running on one-to-four-processor Microsoft
Windows servers.
Now, Microsoft is trying to scale it up so it can be used in
larger enterprise deployments.
Microsoft will release four versions of SQL Server 2005, with
the top version targeted at high-end users, to compete with Oracle
and IBM. For the first time, it will boast performance features
such as partitioning, previously available only on high-end
databases such as Oracle and DB2.
Partitioning in SQL Server creates smaller subsections to
improve performance. The other performance booster is parallel
index creation, which speeds up the database indexing process.
These features have been available from Oracle for several
years.
Noel Yuhanna, senior analyst at Forrester Research, said SQL
Server has come a long way in establishing itself as a strong
enterprise DBMS, dominating in manageability, integration and low
cost. But he noted that it had often struggled to be seen as a
leader in high-end performance and scalability, where it continues
to trail IBM and Oracle in advanced features.
"Microsoft is positioning SQL Server 2005 to compete head-on
with Oracle and IBM in performance and scalability, but is SQL
Server ready for high-end performance delivery? There is no
indication yet that Microsoft will become a high-end DBMS player
any time soon," he said.
Yuhanna said Forrester estimates that of the 2,000 high-end
database deployments worldwide with production databases larger
than 1Tbyte, about 80 run SQL Server, with most running Oracle or
DB2.
"SQL Server 2000 implementations for high-end delivery have
stretched the technology well beyond what it was originally
designed for," he said.
The question is whether SQL Server can handle very large
workloads working with multi-terabyte databases and thousands of
concurrent users running on large SMP servers or distributed
clustered environments. "SQL Server 2005 is under increased
pressure to deliver high-end performance," said Yuhanna.
In the summer, Microsoft announced a series of audited TPC
(Transaction Processing Performance Council) benchmark results that
showed SQL Server 2005 was more than 38% faster than SQL Server
2000, with transactions per minute (tpmC) in excess of one
million. The supplier also claimed the new database would provide a
low cost per transaction.
However IBM has recorded a TPC benchmark of 3.2 million tpmC,
significantly raising the bar on high-end performance delivery.
Microsoft now faces the daunting task of delivering even higher
performance with its SQL Server 2005 release. Two years ago,
Microsoft trumpeted then-leading benchmarks and pledged to stay on
top. If SQL Server 2005 does not deliver record-breaking, or at
least competitive numbers, it will lose some of the credibility
that it has built up as a high-end DBMS.
In addition, Forrester reported that some beta SQL Server 2005
users found no key high-end scalability benefits, or the level of
high-end performance and scalability needed to meet their growing
application requirements. "This has been a key concern about SQL
Server 2005, and some firms are migrating to Oracle, DB2 and other
DBMS instead of waiting for another major SQL Server release beyond
2005," Yuhanna said.
Some of SQL Server 2005's performance features, such as
partitioning and parallel index creation, have been available from
Oracle for several years, so in some respects, SQL Server 2005 is
playing catch up with the competition at the high-end.
However, SQL Server 2005 will offer some performance improvement
because the 64-bit edition runs on 64-bit processors such as
Intel's Itanium and AMD's Opteron, and it is designed to improve
the performance of large datawarehouses, batch programs, and large
online transaction processing applications. According to Microsoft,
users typically claim to achieve a performance improvement of 10%
or more with 64-bit.
The 64-bit SQL Server can be configured to run as an in-memory
database - where all transactions run in Ram, avoiding the
degradation in performance that arises when the database accesses
disc drives. But it is early days for application writers to
realise the potential and exploit this, said Forrester.
Donald Feinberg, vice-president and distinguished analyst at
Gartner, believes SQL Server 2005 will, overall, have been worth
the wait, with most of the functions Microsoft promised being
incorporated.
"The only notable exception is a DBMS clustering system for high
availability," he said. "This feature has been pushed off to a
future release, leaving Oracle as the only supplier offering a DBMS
with a clustering implementation, through Real Application
Clusters.
"Users who are less risk-averse or need the added functionality
or increased performance of SQL Server 2005, should consider using
the new release in limited production environments in the first
quarter of 2006.
"Users that are risk-averse or do not need the added
functionality or increased performance, should wait for Microsoft
to release Service Pack 1." This is expected in the second quarter
of 2006.
However, Kevin Kline, president of international SQL Server user
group Pass, said, "I know of several huge enterprises that went to
production on beta versions of SQL Server 2005 because of
improvements in speed and new data mining capabilities. The
high-availability improvements are a real boon to line database
administrators who want to make their databases more scalable and
available."
Kline believes the Microsoft product lacks some of the new
technology available in Oracle and DB2. He said, "SQL Server 2005
still needs hash partitioning and synonyms, which Oracle and DB2
have. SQL Server also needs multiple tempDBs [temporary databases
that run on the master database] as Sybase has. And the biggest
feature that Microsoft needs to work on is an answer for Oracle's
Real Application Clusters, ie a load-balancing solution spread
across multiple servers."
Michael Azoff, senior research analyst at Butler Group, said SQL
Server 2005 Enterprise Edition's free business intelligence system
may encourage some users to switch to Microsoft. Another factor was
Microsoft's plans to change the licensing of server software for
virtual machines, and this may also influence users.
But as Microsoft continues to enhance the SQL Server database to
make it a compelling alternative to DB2 and Oracle in terms of
functionality, performance and cost, users do have a lower-end
alternative in the open source MySQL database.
MySQL will continue to be attractive to companies carrying out
tasks that do not need industrial-strength transaction or
analytical processing, Azoff said. "MySQL is still evolving and is
not an 'enterprise' database. However, as a back end to websites
and other similar applications, it is perfectly good, so expect
continued growth for MySQL."
Olap feature 'a big step forward'
A new online analytical processing (Olap) feature in SQL Server
2005 is a big step forward for the database product that will help
to support high-end users, according to Nigel Pendse, author of the
Olap Report website.
"It supports much more complex data models, larger applications
and is a much more robust product because it shares a lot of the
online transaction processing database infrastructure, which the
2000 version did not," he said.
"It is very likely that it will continue to gain users at the
expense of other Olap servers, as it has ever since it was released
at the end of 1998."
But Pendse added, "The one area Microsoft has not addressed in
this release is data write-back performance, so the product still
will not be very suitable for planning applications. But in most
other respects, it is a very strong product, and easily able to
compete with far more expensive products."
Key features in SQL Server 2005
Database mirroring: Database mirroring can be used to boost the
availability of SQL Server systems by setting up automatic failover
to a standby server.
Online restore: SQL Server 2005 lets database administrators
perform a restore operation while an instance of SQL Server is
running.
Security enhancements: Security enhancements include database
encryption, secure default settings, password policy enforcement,
and fine-grained permissions control.
.net Framework hosting: Developers can create database objects
using Visual C# .net and Microsoft Visual Basic .net.
XML technologies:Native support for storage and query of XML
documents.
Web services: Developers will be able to develop web services in
the database tier.
Full text search: Support for rich, full text search
applications, giving greater flexibility over what is
catalogued.
Analysis services: SQL Server 2005 has real-time analytics
features.
Reporting services: Reporting services provide self-service, ad
hoc report creation, and enhanced query development for Olap
environments.
Microsoft Office System integration: Reports served up by the
report server can run under Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server and
Office applications such as Word and Excel.