Microsoft hits the Yukon trail


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MICROSOFT HAS PLANS to tie all is products in to the upcoming "trustworthy, non-stop" SQL database release, codenamed Yukon.

Stan Sorensen, director of SQL product management at Microsoft has been outlining the company's plans for its next-generation database due to go into beta early next year, and which is optimised, says Sorensen, for the "Intel architecture". In fact, Sorensen believes Intel's is "the most viable architecture going forward."

He poured scorn on rivals who were optimised for more expensive hardware, claiming Intel offered better "performance, scale and value". And even managed to get excited about Itanium2. "Itanium 2 boxes are the thing that are really going get us to big scale-up numbers," he said.

He said there were only really three chip architectures worth dealing with: IBM Power4, Solaris ("because Sun's never going to go away as a hardware company") and Intel's. And he said he was expecting great thing of Intel's 64-bit plans.

Sorensen declined to be drawn on what features of Yukon might be included in Microsoft's next major operating system outing, Longhorn, other than admit there was some cross over. But it is clear that Microsoft wants to make data from any Microsoft product available to its SQL database. The company is seeking: "synergies in the way data can be managed across all Microsoft products," he said. "Bill (Gates) meets with the engineering team every single week on this problem," he added.

Yukon will introduce a special XML column type that can be managed like any other piece of data and the thrust if the company's activity is to find ways of handling "structured and semi-structured data in a single space." Sorensen said that while data from products like calendars and contacts and email programs could be managed by SQL Server today, the task was to "work towards common schema that all Microsoft products can use and then create a relationship between all these schema."

A further goal would be to include schema for non-Microsoft products, he said.

Microsoft's strategy is to leverage its ownership of the desktop to make its enterprise-level SQL database the definitive tool by making any sort of data from any application available to it. The integration of Yukon code in to future operating systems is implied rather than explicit, though.

Sorenson said the database business is the fourth-biggest business in Microsoft. "It's a billion-dollar business," he said. "It's hard to grow other businesses but the SQL business will grow. It's all up-scale," he said. ?

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5637

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