Microsoft Corp yesterday formally launched version 7.0 of its SQL Server database, predicting sales of more than 3 million licenses of the software by the end of this fiscal year in June 1999. Speaking on the first day of the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas, Microsoft Corp president Steve Ballmer said the new software would hit resellers’ shelves in 45 days. He projected that within 12 months the company would catch up with market leader Oracle Corp in terms of total new users. I’ll make the bold projection that we’ll catch them (in terms of new users) within the first 12 months,” he told Reuters, in terms of overall installed base, it will take a little longer.” The new release will be the first Microsoft relational database to support all flavors of its 32- bit operating systems; Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT Workstation, NT Server, and NT Server Enterprise Edition. One of the key new additions to SQL Server 7.0 is an OLAP server, formerly code-named Plato but now renamed as OLAP Services. Microsoft said it was working on integrating OLAP Services with its Office 2000 applications suite (which ships in 1999) to enable users to use the Excel spreadsheet as a front end to OLAP Services to carry out queries of multidimensional data. It will also include new technology, called row-level locking, to enable ERP applications to run natively on the database. Row-level locking lets applications such as SAP’s R/3 hook onto a specific row in a database rather than just a page, resulting in fewer problems when a number of people are making changes to the database. SQL Server 7.0 will contain full row-level locking as opposed to the limited version of the technology available in the previous release, SQL Server 6.5, Microsoft said. Also new are additional data transformation services that enable users to fill their SQL warehouse with data from other sources, such as an Oracle database for example. Last week (CI No 3,535) Microsoft gave pricing and packaging details for the three versions of SQL Server 7.0; the standard edition, the enterprise edition and SQL Server 7.0 Desktop. The latter ships as part of the standard and enterprise editions, but companies wanting to access the software will still have to pay on a per-seat license basis, Redmond said. The software is scheduled to be available worldwide in the reseller channel within the next 45 days, with French, German, Spanish and Japanese versions available within 60 days. In anticipation of strong demand for the database, Microsoft said it has increased the number of engineers supporting SQL Server by 70%. Product support is also available through Microsoft Authorized Support Centers (ASC). More than 300 business applications representing are expected to be available for SQL Server 7.0 within 90 days of the product’s launch, the company said. á
