Iron-pumping Microsoft SQL Server due this summer

The next blocks in Microsoft's SQL Server and appliance-based data-warehouse strategy will be put in place starting this summer. A Community Technology Preview edition of SQL Server 2008 R2, codenamed Kilimanjaro, will be made available in the second half of this year, Microsoft has said. CTP is the first opportunity you'll …

[Anonymous Coward]

But will it sell?

They would sell more copies if they had a licensing model where after you buy 10 Cores' worth then the next 10 is cheaper, and so on. Possibly create a copy of Server 2008 Core that is nothing but SQL, and make it cheaper than buying the OS and SQL together.

[Jimbo]

interesting ...

Microsoft is doing interesting moves in BI world ... I really like how they try to integrate Excel and Sharepoint services.

I love Oracle Database, but to be honest I really don't think they have unified approach across their products (it's been 3 years since they aquired Hyperion and so far except few logos I haven't see any strong hyperion (essbase, intelligence, ...) integration with oracle database nor Oracle OLAP.

[Anonymous Coward]

hmmmmmmmmm

Whooptie fokin doo I say.

Sooooo many better alternatives out there ;)

[Anonymous Coward]

Err...

@AC 19:57 - They do, what happens is your purchasing people beat them up until they reduce the price. Only a big eejit pays full list price for enterprise software.

@AC 22:55 - Thanks for that, insightfull and informative. And just what are those better alternatives and which parts of them are better than which features of SQL Server and in which situations?

[Anonymous Coward]

RE: But will it sell / hmmmmmmm

1 - Microsoft dont charge per core so what difference does it make? They only charge per physcial socket regardless of number of cores.

2 - How do you know that the alternatives are better? the product isnt even out there for you to play with!! If the BI conference that took place last year was anything to go by it should be a pretty 'fokin' good product.

With regards to the others:

Neteeza - nice idea of an all-in-one appliance but a one trick pony

Terradata - good product, bl00dy expensive

Oracle RAC/Exadata - Rac not suited to DW implementations hence Exadata now on the scene

Greenplum - see Neteeza

IBM - DB2, good product.. again bl00dy expensive especially when combined with a M/F

Overall I see Microsoft, IBM and Oracle (eventually) winning this war with the better interop story into LOB and BI apps.

[David Halko]

Interesting to see the database appliance history...

The appliance history has been moving fast...

2006-07 - Sun and Greenplum announced Postgress data warehouse appliance to be shipped on Sun hardware and OS some time back, where Sun would provide commercial support for Postgres.

2006-10- IBM responds with DB2 on IBM (third party linux OS) hardware integrated, as an end-to-end solution

2008-01 - Sun buys MySQL database

2008-04 - Sun and Kickfire announced MySQL data warehouse appliance with Sun stack

2008-09 - Oracle teamed with HP for integrated appliance solution.

2009-04 - Oracle, attempting to purchased Sun, for a complete end-to-end hardware, OS, database stack (and received 2 other database appliance stacks using alternate databases.)

It is nice to see Microsoft getting involved in database appliances!

[David Halko]

Would have been nice...

Would have been nice for the author to mention some of the appliances built by/with Sun in the article.

[Jimbo]

really?

"Oracle RAC/Exadata - Rac not suited to DW implementations hence Exadata now on the scene"

we have 6 nodes RAC 10.2 with 100TB data.... works pretty dam good as DW (yes Exadata is better because of SQL aware Kernel, but still RAC in general is very good for DW)

problem with Oracle is that they aquired so many BI platforms that they cannot get a good grip around it. I wish Oracle OLAP would work at least half as good as ESSBASE