The remaining components of Microsoft Corp’s BackOffice Enterprise family, SQL Server Enterprise Edition 6.5 and SNA Server 4.0, will be released to manufacturing before the end of the year, the company said yesterday, and are now expected to be generally available in January 1998. Microsoft promised improved scalability on the new SQL Server, boasting support for up to eight-way symmetric multiprocessing servers in the retail product and up to 32-way systems in the bigger OEM systems. It claimed that Transaction Processing Council TPCC benchmarks showed scalability over 75% higher than standard editions of the product. The new software offers 50% more application memory: it can now assign up to 3Gb of memory per application and supports clustering in Windows NT Server Enterprise Edition. Information retrieval has been simplified with the addition of the Microsoft English Query utility. Microsoft wheeled out the usual suspects to cheer on the latest releases in the shape of the Baan Company, SAP, SAS Institute Inc and Platinum Software amongst others. SNA Server 4.0 will help users of AS/400 and mainframe systems reuse existing CICS and IMS transactions as components of Microsoft’s recently defined DNA Distributed InterNet Architecture (CI No 3,253). The latest version also offers access to data stored in VSAM files as well as server gateway enhancements which Microsoft claims doubles capacity to 30,000 simultaneous sessions per server. Pricing for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition 6.5 starts at $8,000 for a 35-user system. The SNA Server costs from $1,340 for a five user system with a 90-day evaluation version available for free download at http://www.microsoft.com/sna/.
