Microsoft's Sphinx Is Poised for the Enterprise

ENT, March 4, 1998 by Jim Lefevre

In May of last year, Microsoft Corp. held a public relations extravaganza known as Scalability Day that was designed to promote Windows NT as an enterprise-class operating system. Featured prominently in the festivities was the TerraServer, a database powered by Digital AlphaServers running Sphinx, Microsoft's next-generation SQL Server product. An impressive demo, the database was packed with more than 50 million metadata records. However, the fact that Sphinx was unavailable to customers only emphasized the fact that Microsoft still had a way to go in providing a scalable database solution.

In the months since then, Microsoft has been hard at work making Sphinx a reality. In mid-January, its efforts came to an initial fruition: The company began shipping the first broadly available beta of Microsoft SQL Sever 7.0 (Beta 2). Judging by the capabilities Microsoft has added to the SQL mix, the company appears serious about pushing its database into the enterprise, competing with the big names, such as Oracle Corp. and IBM Corp. "We're definitely looking at DB/2 and Oracle; they're good databases, but we think we can do a lot better," says John Nordlinger, product manager of SQL Server marketing for Microsoft's Business Systems division.

SQL Server 7.0, which has been under development for the past 2 to 3 years, will arrive in a final release version sometime in the second half of this year. But when it finally hits the shelves, SQL Server 7.0 will face stiff competition from rival database companies such as Oracle, which is slated to release the next version of its Oracle8 Parallel Server this spring. Microsoft is not worried. "Oracle would say its strength is [being] the universal database. Rather than storing everything in one database, we're trying to provide access to everything, no matter where it's located. We'd say Microsoft's strength is being universally accessible and reachable," says Nordlinger. Oracle representatives were not available for comment.

Toward this end, Microsoft has worked overtime to shore up its waning SQL Server offering, which according to industry analyst firms Dataquest (San Jose, Calif.) and International Data Corp. (IDC, Framingham, Mass.), has quietly lost market share over the past year to Oracle.

In the attempt to address these challenges, Microsoft has retooled and refined its SQL database architecture to include a new query processor that supports parallel execution; the ability to query both ODBC and OLE DB and other performance enhancers; increased size limits for pages, rows and tables; and support for row-level locking, which is integral to many enterprise applications, such as SAP R/3. The beta also includes a new personal version of SQL Server 7.0 that features a smaller memory footprint and fits on laptop machines.

Also added are features designed to make SQL Server more adept in data warehousing applications. Microsoft is working on a hybrid OLAP sever, codenamed Plato, that is optimized for SQL Server 7.0. Plato, will feature its own multidimensional database and enable users to access relational databases in addition to SQL Server. At this point, Microsoft is unsure of how the products will be sold. Plato could ship with SQL Server 7.0, or it may be available separately.

Another new feature called Data Transformation Service (DTS) enables users to extract and transform data residing in OLE DB, ODBC or text file formats and build data marts and warehouses in SQL Server. Improvements in monitoring and debugging tools and tighter integration with Microsoft development tools enable developers to create database applications more easily.

Microsoft has spent time both streamlining and bolstering the management capabilities of its database server. Many SQL Server configuration options have been simplified and automated, and databases now reside on operating-system files instead of SQL Server logical devices. The SQL Server Enterprise Manager administration tool now enables users to manage multiple servers using a centralized server, and the tool has been integrated into the Microsoft Management Console so that administrators can manage large distributed database environments. Other management enhancements include event-based job execution and alerting and security that is integrated with Windows NT.

Microsoft will not rest on its database laurels with the release of SQL Server 7.0; SQL Server 99 is already in the works and is expected to sport such features as an alternative engine to get at Access data, OLAP features for Excel, self-tuning databases and the ability to perform heterogeneous queries.

Carl Olofson, research director of database management systems for IDC, says that although SQL Server 7.0 doesn't add much in brand-new, never-before-thought-of technology, it does provide easy-to-use, high-performance database technologies that are contained in a uniform package: "Anybody who thinks that SQL is just another release will be really shocked. We're talking magnitudes of improvement here. It's a different product, and it'll give the major database vendors a real run for their money."