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SQL Server Yukon to Emphasize Ease of Use
PDC, October 29, 2003 Admitting that "there's never enough ease-of-use in the platform," Gordon Mangione, Microsoft's corporate vice president for its SQL Server team, said that improving enterprise data management is at the core of the product's upcoming new release, code-named Yukon. "For this release, I've really tasked the [SQL development] team to take to heart something I call serviceability," said Mangione, speaking in a keynote address to attendees at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles. In his preview of the long-awaited iteration of the SQL Server product, Mangione said that to expand the ease of management, a key is to provide tools in the database that will help you figure out what goes wrong immediately when it goes wrong. "This is all about the database maintaining those stats, making it just a query away so you can find out what's going on in the database," he said. Business intelligence (BI) is one important area where a lot of enterprises will be pushing their SQL departments to take serviceability further, and not surprisingly Mangione says that BI is the hottest area in database use today. The growth of BI from something every business reporter endlessly talked about to something every business wants to use is dependent upon their systems being able to access and serve up the required information fast and accurately enough. "It's great that all that data goes into the database," he said, "but it's useless unless it comes out in ways that I can make use of." He pointed to the experience from gaming company MGM Mirage, which owns 18 hotels in Las Vegas, containing thousands of rooms and 15,000 slot machines. He says that every coin that goes into those slot machines is recorded in a SQL Server. A goal for the firm's managers is to tie together each customer's spend rate with intelligence, to help them figure out how to serve each specific customer based on his or her spending pattern. "They've recently upgraded their system to 64-bit," Mangione said. "It took them three hours to upgrade. Same protocols, same database format, same execution format. They're up and running with no changes to their applications whatsoever." Yukon, which has been in beta for six months, is based on the .NET Framework. Mangione said the ability to leverage that platform to expose Yukon services as Web services will let users get access to their data independent of the machine to which they're connecting. "This is our commitment: We know that interoperability is critically important to you, and Web services and the .NET Framework is at the center of everything we've done with this release," he said. If Windows Server System users have become impatient waiting for this SQL Server release, Mangione promises that the wait will have been worth it: "What Yukon is is a big, big, big release for SQL Server." About the Author |