Microsoft Corp has been showing off its SQL 7.0 to 2,000 or so software developers at a workshop in Los Angeles this week, ahead of its official launch, now slated for the second half of the year. SQL Server 7.0, also known under the codename Sphinx, was once intended to be called SQL Server 97 until the inevitable delays took hold (CI No 3,251). It’s now reached the beta stage, with a second release issued last month. SQL 7.0 is intended to extend the reach of SQL Server into e-commerce, mobile computing and data marts, increase its scalability and make it easier to manage. For mobiles, there is a personal version with a low memory footprint. Data extraction and transformation, under the new Data Transformation Services, helps support data warehouses, along with improved handling of complex queries and very large databases. Other new features include row level locking, intaquery parallelism, multisite update replication and distributed query tools. Microsoft has set up a migration lab for the product where it’s working with the top 100 ISVs to optimize applications before the product ships. The tweaking of applications will be involved – Pivotal Software Inc said that small changes to the code were needed to optimize its customer relationship management package, but that the result was a ten-fold increase in query performance, it claimed. It’s not yet clear how backward compatible for end-users the new product will be. Jim Ewel, group product manager for database and development technologies at Microsoft, claimed that the number of applications for SQL Server 6.5 has quadrupled over the last 18 months, and says Microsoft has already snagged the top five accounting system ISVs, four of the top five ERP vendors, six of the top six customer management vendors and eight of the top ten health care vendors. Figures from International Data Corp say that 44% of database shipments with Windows NT Server are for SQL Server, compared with 28% for nearest rival Oracle Corp.
