Confident product managers from Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft believe that forthcoming changes to their database, codenamed Yukon, will help increase the planned product’s availability and scalability.
David Campbell, SQL Server storage engine product unit manager, said last week: High-end availability will be ahead of DB2 in Yukon and on parity with Oracle. He spoke as Microsoft released a technical preview of Yukon, which is due for beta in the first half of this year.
Despite large customer installations, SQL Server is still perceived by many as a database for department-level use. Microsoft partners, meanwhile, admit they face difficulty coaxing users off Redwood Shores, California-based Oracle’s database.
Campbell, appearing at Microsoft’s annual VSLive! event in San Francisco, California last week, told ComputerWire that changes in partitioning would make Yukon considerably faster.
He refused to provide further details of the partitioning technology, but instead pointed to successful e-commerce web sites that partitioned data for catalogues, shopping carts and fulfillment information as a way forward. This approach also helped to ensure uptime, avoiding outages suffered by websites whose underlying databases were not partitioned.
Campbell said support for 64-bit computing would help increase the number of users that can be supported by SQL Server. He added that support by server manufacturers for 64-bit processors would also assist customers’ adoption of Yukon.
Other changes in the database are designed to broaden Yukon’s appeal among developers. Integration with Microsoft’s Visual Studo.NET will see the suites’ IntelliSense capability extended to developing for the database, offering auto-completion of commands and helping save time and cut labor.
Integration with Visual Studio.NET and the .NET Framework will, as previously reported, bring the ability to build stored procedures in languages other than T-SQL.
Campbell added, though, Microsoft would not retire T-SQL. Instead, he said, changes in Yukon proved the company remains wedded to the language. Changes to T-SQL include support for exception handling, new data types and recursive query types.
Yukon also supports web services, with ability to search both relational and XML data and ability for the database to generate Web Services Description Language (WSDL).
Source: Computerwire
