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A Talk With Database Guru Jim Gray
Find out about the future of SQL Server 2000 and extreme scaling from Microsoft's resident expert in large databases.
Interview by Lee Thé
Posted February 1, 2002
Jim Gray was a key player in building the TerraServer, a 12-terabyte spatial data warehouse using Microsoft SQL Server 2000 as its building blocks. The TerraServer Web site averages 7 million hits per day. That's the sort of project Jim Gray likes. He founded and runs Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC), a research lab that focuses on scalable computing by building superservers and workgroup systems from commodity software and hardware. These modular systems also have built-in fault tolerance, allowing continuous operation in case of failure.
Jim will deliver a keynote address at VSLive! San Francisco in February—to tide you over, Visual Studio Magazine's executive editor Lee Thé talked with him about extreme scaling, integration of heterogeneous data types, and more.
LT: How will the upcoming integration of .NET into SQL Server affect performance, use of SQL Server as a data source for Web services, and so on. And how will it work? Will SQL Server essentially become a .NET host? Or just hooks with .NET Framework namespaces and classes?
JG: The integration of SQL Server with .NET is a major advance. It's the next step after OLE DB—integrating objects with databases. SQL Server becomes the data integrator, the way to deal with sets of objects. We have been chasing the Object-Relational rainbow and we are near the pot of gold—an extensible database. Now you will be able to store objects in the database, and you will be able to treat databases as objects. Performance should be even better with compiled languages than with interpreted T-SQL. And now stored procedures will be first-class objects.
LT: SQL Server appears to be taking on more and more roles for any and all types of static data stores. What types of data stores can you foresee SQL Server replacing? The Registry? The file services? E-mail storage?
JG: Yes. Oracle, DB2, and SQL Server are each on a path to store "files": photos, videos, voicemail, e-mail, documents, and everything else. The integration of SQL Server with an object system (.NET) makes this attractive. Microsoft has been shooting for this for a long time. To the database folks it seems a natural evolution. To others it seems unnatural. There is a competition happening—each camp proposing a way to solve the problems. No doubt the end result will be a synthesis of all these ideas. But I think we all agree that storage management has to be more automatic and easier. We all have a common goal. The only debate is how to get there.
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