Jiansen Lu
News on SQL Server Kilimanjaro, Project Madison and Gemini
December 2nd 2008 13:34
News on SQL Server Kilimanjaro, Project Madison and Gemini
Problem
What does Microsoft have in store for SQL Server over the next few years? What is the general roadmap from an IT (DBA, Developer, IT Pro, etc.) and user perspective? What sorts of technologies are they making an investment in that I should be aware of as I make plans for my infrastructure and applications?
Solution
SQL PASS 2008 started off with a bang when SQL PASS President Wayne Snyder introduced Ted Kummert of Microsoft who is the Corporate Vice President of the Data and Storage Platform Division. The session started off with a teaser video where Tom Casey, Mark Souza, Michael Rys, Donald Farmer and Sarah Henwood talked about the many new opportunities with SQL Server such as with business intelligence, spatial data types, etc.
Ted started off when an energetic welcome and brief reflection on SQL PASS since last year's summit. He talked about some of the accomplishments from the SQL Server CTP release last year to the SQL Server RTM August 2008. He also recognized SQL PASS as the largest SQL Server community summit with 136 chapters and 30,000 members. He concluded with thanking everyone at SQL PASS for all of their hard work. Then the news, code names and excitement started flowing.
SQL Server 2008's Success
Ted talked about SQL Server 2008 successes which caught everyone's attention:
Over 1 million downloads of SQL Server 2008 RTM
Leading Performance Benchmarks - TPC-H, TPC-E and Applications
Fastest growing relational database world wide
Fewest vulnerabilities of any enterprise database
Strong feature set:
Policy based management
Transparent data encryption
New data types for business processes and applications such as spatial, geometry and geography into the database
Filestream - high volume of unstructured data
LINQ - Easier to deal with collections of data
Change Data Capture
The Next Releases for SQL Server
On the heels of the SQL Server 2008 release in August 2008, the plans for the next SQL Server version are already being touted as industry changing opportunities. Ted believes that 2010 is going to be a big year for the SQL Server community with the potential for a few new releases to include:
Kilimanjaro - Keep an eye out for Kilimanjaro. This is the code name for the next release of SQL Server. It is expected to be released in 2010 or 24 to 36 months after the SQL Server 2008 release. One of the items that caught my eye was the ability to manage multiple SQL Server instances and migrate code seamlessly between the environments with a 'DAC Pack' which is a consolidated set of code.
Project Madison - This demo from Jesse Fountain, Principal Group Manager Data and Storage Platform, just about made my eyes fall out of my head and I expect it will be the case for most BI folks when they see it. Project Madison is all about data warehouse scalability. Microsoft recently purchased DATAllegro and have migrated the technology from Linux to a Microsoft based software solution. The demo was showed the disk workload on one of the large screens and then the Reporting Services user interface on the other. The Reporting Services response time across a large data set with low cost hardware was impressive. This technology has the potential to slay performance problems across the largest data warehouses.
Gemini - Donald Farmer caught everyone's attention when he flew on stage as a fairy God-Mother with wings and a magic wand. He demonstrated Gemini as an add-in to Microsoft Excel with support for 10 million rows. Not only that, you could filter and sort the data instantly, slice and dice the data with Excel 'slicers', infer relationships, apply themes, etc. I know this is going to catch analysts and power users eyes when it is released since so many of them rely on Excel on a daily basis.
SQL Server 2008 from the field
One of the areas that was most inspiring was when Ted brought Ayad Shommout on to the stage to share his story about using SQL Server 2008. Ayad is a SQL Server DBA for CareGroup Healthcare System in Boston. At Ayad's organization they have a mixed SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 environment. They began the upgrade process to SQL Server 2008 in December 2007 months before the release to manufacturing in August 2008. Right now they have hundreds of mission critical databases running SQL Server 2008 and have reaped a 20 to 25 percent performance increase without any code changes. They are leveraging Resource Governor to split the hardware resources and Policy Based Management to manage tens of thousands of users. In addition, they are using Transparent Data Encryption and auditing for HIPAA compliance. It was great to see someone from the community up on stage sharing their real world experiences.
Problem
What does Microsoft have in store for SQL Server over the next few years? What is the general roadmap from an IT (DBA, Developer, IT Pro, etc.) and user perspective? What sorts of technologies are they making an investment in that I should be aware of as I make plans for my infrastructure and applications?
Solution
SQL PASS 2008 started off with a bang when SQL PASS President Wayne Snyder introduced Ted Kummert of Microsoft who is the Corporate Vice President of the Data and Storage Platform Division. The session started off with a teaser video where Tom Casey, Mark Souza, Michael Rys, Donald Farmer and Sarah Henwood talked about the many new opportunities with SQL Server such as with business intelligence, spatial data types, etc.
Ted started off when an energetic welcome and brief reflection on SQL PASS since last year's summit. He talked about some of the accomplishments from the SQL Server CTP release last year to the SQL Server RTM August 2008. He also recognized SQL PASS as the largest SQL Server community summit with 136 chapters and 30,000 members. He concluded with thanking everyone at SQL PASS for all of their hard work. Then the news, code names and excitement started flowing.
SQL Server 2008's Success
Ted talked about SQL Server 2008 successes which caught everyone's attention:
Over 1 million downloads of SQL Server 2008 RTM
Leading Performance Benchmarks - TPC-H, TPC-E and Applications
Fastest growing relational database world wide
Fewest vulnerabilities of any enterprise database
Strong feature set:
Policy based management
Transparent data encryption
New data types for business processes and applications such as spatial, geometry and geography into the database
Filestream - high volume of unstructured data
LINQ - Easier to deal with collections of data
Change Data Capture
The Next Releases for SQL Server
On the heels of the SQL Server 2008 release in August 2008, the plans for the next SQL Server version are already being touted as industry changing opportunities. Ted believes that 2010 is going to be a big year for the SQL Server community with the potential for a few new releases to include:
Kilimanjaro - Keep an eye out for Kilimanjaro. This is the code name for the next release of SQL Server. It is expected to be released in 2010 or 24 to 36 months after the SQL Server 2008 release. One of the items that caught my eye was the ability to manage multiple SQL Server instances and migrate code seamlessly between the environments with a 'DAC Pack' which is a consolidated set of code.
Project Madison - This demo from Jesse Fountain, Principal Group Manager Data and Storage Platform, just about made my eyes fall out of my head and I expect it will be the case for most BI folks when they see it. Project Madison is all about data warehouse scalability. Microsoft recently purchased DATAllegro and have migrated the technology from Linux to a Microsoft based software solution. The demo was showed the disk workload on one of the large screens and then the Reporting Services user interface on the other. The Reporting Services response time across a large data set with low cost hardware was impressive. This technology has the potential to slay performance problems across the largest data warehouses.
Gemini - Donald Farmer caught everyone's attention when he flew on stage as a fairy God-Mother with wings and a magic wand. He demonstrated Gemini as an add-in to Microsoft Excel with support for 10 million rows. Not only that, you could filter and sort the data instantly, slice and dice the data with Excel 'slicers', infer relationships, apply themes, etc. I know this is going to catch analysts and power users eyes when it is released since so many of them rely on Excel on a daily basis.
SQL Server 2008 from the field
One of the areas that was most inspiring was when Ted brought Ayad Shommout on to the stage to share his story about using SQL Server 2008. Ayad is a SQL Server DBA for CareGroup Healthcare System in Boston. At Ayad's organization they have a mixed SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 environment. They began the upgrade process to SQL Server 2008 in December 2007 months before the release to manufacturing in August 2008. Right now they have hundreds of mission critical databases running SQL Server 2008 and have reaped a 20 to 25 percent performance increase without any code changes. They are leveraging Resource Governor to split the hardware resources and Policy Based Management to manage tens of thousands of users. In addition, they are using Transparent Data Encryption and auditing for HIPAA compliance. It was great to see someone from the community up on stage sharing their real world experiences.
| 56 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
