SQL Server 2005 Update from Paul Flessner
 As Senior Vice President of the Server Applications at Microsoft Corp., Paul Flessner leads an integrated product team that delivers application platform products as part of the Microsoft Windows Server System, including Exchange Server, SQL Server, BizTalk Server, Content Management Server, Host Integration Server and Commerce Server. Read more about Paul on the Microsoft PressPass site. |
In my last update I talked about the release of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, how pleased we were to deliver it to you, and how we expected it to change the database market, again. It seems that many of you agreed! In the four months since our release over 300,000 of you have attended one of the 307 launch events, held in 247 cities across 92 countries. In addition to the over 6 million copies of our CTPs that you downloaded during our development cycle, there have now also been over 2 million copies of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition downloaded as well, making SQL Server 2005 truly a milestone product for our industry. So thank you for your support, your input and feedback, and your business.
Your active and collaborative input throughout our CTP process has enabled us to move quickly in continuing the momentum and innovation of SQL Server 2005 with the release of Service Pack 1 (SP1), shipping later this month. SQL Server 2005 SP1 delivers on our previous commitment to ship database mirroring and SQL Server 2005 Management Studio Express. We are not only delivering database mirroring functionality in its final form, but thanks to your feedback we also have had the opportunity to enhance this functionality by adding improvements such as additional monitoring tools. So, again, thank you!
Of course one of the reasons I love the technology industry, and software in particular, is that nothing ever stands still; change is the only constant. A decade ago we saw the need for a database offering which combined enterprise scale with a low total cost of ownership, higher agility for building data-driven applications, and integrated business intelligence. Today I want to share with you some of our thinking around the key requirements for data management in the next decade.
Today the cost of storage continues to be on an amazing trajectory; one could reasonably expect that the cost of a terabyte will be reduced from about $1000 today to $100 in 2007. Historical trends imply that in 20 years or less we will be able to store literally everything digitally, and the petabyte will be a standard measure of personal storage.
As we move from managing transactional data to pre-transactional, as with RFID and other sensors, we will face a 10-100 factor increase in data volume. As an industry we are facing an unprecedented explosion of data that we will need to manage, with the ability to organize, summarize, and prioritize all of this information becoming a key priority for IT.
Today’s workforce is also increasingly mobile and having the right data, at the right place at the right time is crucial to effectiveness. Applications will be occasionally connected, so they need sophisticated data management and synchronization capabilities to integrate with distributed systems and provide the right data at the right time.
So what does all this change mean for data management in general and how is Microsoft helping you prepare for the future?
We have a vision to meet the needs of the coming data explosion and the next generation of data-driven applications. We see you, our customers, requiring a data platform that can store and manage all of the different varieties of data, XML, email, time/calendar, file, document, spatial, etc. You will be able to do this with security enhanced rich services such as: search, query, analysis, sharing, and synchronization. You will be able to access this data from birth to archive and on any device. So your smart-phone will be able to work with a mega-service in the cloud. This is the core of our vision which we think of as Your Data, Any Place, Any Time .
We will work on this vision over the next several releases of SQL Server, which we expect to deliver on a anticipated schedule of one release approximately every 24-36 months. Our investments will be across four key themes:
Continuous Availability and Automation. As we work to evolve data management from primarily manual to self-tuning, self organizing, and self maintaining, we will push on TCO, focusing on scaling up our enterprise abilities while also dramatically increasing the level of administrative automation. As part of our commitment in this key area, today we introduce SQL Server AlwaysOn Technologies . We know that many database applications, and specifically line of business systems, must be built to ensure zero or minimum down time, and SQL Server AlwaysOn Technologies will provide customers with a full range of options for achieving and maintaining appropriate levels of application availability. In SQL Server 2005, SQL Server AlwaysOn Technologies include database mirroring, failover clustering, database snapshots, and enhanced online operations. You can certainly expect us to invest significantly in expanding this list in upcoming releases.
Beyond Relational. As the data your applications work with changes from “words and numbers” to “sights and sounds”, we will evolve our data platform to go beyond relational data, beyond OLAP, to truly support all of the digital data types of the future. We will strive to deliver the best platform for integrated storage, and advanced applications such as spatial data, while also making it dramatically easier for you to build data-driven applications, without needing to invest significant resources in bridging the gap between data and programming language data structures.
Dynamic Applications. As the applications you build and use evolve from isolated and rigid to adaptive and synchronized, we will strive to provide you with the richest and most productive platform for database development, while also delivering new synchronization capabilities to enable the rapid creation of occasionally connected applications. As part of our work in this area, today I want to announce a new addition to the SQL Server family, SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition. This new offering for storage on clients of all types will provide a lightweight, compact, but rich subset of the capabilities found in other SQL Server editions. Beyond having rich local data management capabilities, SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition will also include support for seamlessly synchronizing with other SQL Server editions and provides features that promote building rich client applications that operate effectively in today’s increasingly “occasionally connected” environment. SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition also shares a common programming model with the other SQL Server editions, enabling developers to transfer skills and knowledge quickly and easily. We expect to ship the first CTP of SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition this summer, with the goal of final release before the end of this calendar year.
End-To-End Insight. The difference between a successful business and a failed one could be the ability to act on a market trend in time, or the capacity to adjust pricing for a changing market, or maybe in the ability to listen and react to the pulse of customers, partners and employees. End-to-end Insight is all about enabling better decision making through technology to help you collect, clean, store and prepare your business data for real-time decision making. It is also about the experiences that your information workers will have when accessing, analyzing, visualizing and reporting on the data. Our goal is to help you improve your organization by delivering business insights to all your employees, leading to better, faster, and more relevant decisions.
As we face the coming data explosion, the age of the personal petabyte, of new devices, data types, and application architectures, we believe we have the right vision to meet your requirements, to help you manage Your Data, Any Place, Any Time.
As always, I look forward to your feedback.
Paul Flessner
Senior Vice President
Microsoft Corporation