Our sister publication ClieNT Server News reports that Redmond has been secretly working on a single-user version of SQL Server that will run on Windows 95. The general manager of Microsoft Corp’s SQL Server development Paul Flessner reportedly wasn’t supposed to tell, but let word of the project slip during a Q&A session at an SQL developers’ conference in Redmond last week. The mini-SQL, conceived of as a development tool but sure to wind up being used instead of the grown-up Windows NT Server version in some cases, should be ready sometime in 1997. It’s being developed as part of a project code named Sphinx that’s also going to spawn the next release of the full-blown SQL Server, which may emerge as SQL Server 97, the first time Redmond’s talked about using a Windows 95-style naming convention instead of the version numbers associated with NT and BackOffice. Key features being developed for Sphinx include a storage engine that can automatically increase or decrease the disk space used by a database. Most databases nowadays simply keep growing in size until somebody thinks about manually compacting them. Sphinx is also supposed to have dynamic de-escalation from page-level to row-level locking, as needed, compared to just the row-level lock in the current SQL 6.5. To no one’s surprise, Sphinx is being written to support the Phase 2 Wolfpack clustering API, which has to be ready long before Sphinx hits market unless Redmond wants to make a complete fool of itself in the clustering arena. Also being worked on are dynamic configuration, automatic disk management and enhancements to the query processor. Further out, Redmond’s begun fleshing out plans for the SQL Server that will follow Sphinx – SQL Server 98, if you will. The grand plan calls for SQL 98 to be self-tuning and self-healing with shared-nothing cluster support. SQL 98 is also supposed to be the first place that 64-bit data support shows up as part of NT, a project Redmond’s working on with DEC.
