SQL Server Magazine

Editor's Note: Gordon Mangione, Microsoft vice president of SQL Server, will deliver a keynote address at the PASS 2001 North America Users' Conference in Orlando, Florida, this month. For more information about the conference, which runs September 18—22, see http://www.sqlpass.org.

At home in an office along the same hallway where he began his career at Microsoft 10 years ago, Gordon Mangione leads a SQL Server team that's at the heart of Microsoft's .NET strategy. Fresh from his role as vice president of the Microsoft Exchange Server team, Mangione is diving into his new role as Microsoft's vice president of SQL Server. In this exclusive interview, Mangione talks to SQL Server Magazine about the success of SQL Server 2000, building a foundation for the future with XML and .NET, and what the next release of SQL Server, code-named Yukon, will bring.

SQL Server Magazine: Where is the SQL Server business today in terms of revenue and market share?

Mangione: This year, SQL Server broke $1 billion in annual revenue. That's a tremendous milestone and real validation not only for SQL Server but also for our customers and the investments that they've made in these systems. We're still seeing fantastic growth in our business. We're well over 30 percent year-over-year growth and taking share from the competition. We're also seeing the growth of databases on the Windows platform outpacing the growth on the UNIX platform 2 to 1. In terms of unit share, SQL Server has always outpaced the competition on the Windows platform; more than 70 percent of all databases deployed on the Windows platform are SQL Server. But this year, we've surpassed competitors both in units sold and in revenue.

SQL Server Magazine: With SQL Server 2000, the price of the database system increased significantly. For example, the price of SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition is up about 50 percent compared with SQL Server 7.0 Enterprise Edition. How are your customers reacting to your licensing strategy for SQL Server 2000?

Mangione: Many customers told us they wanted to be able to buy SQL Server on a cost basis that reflected the way they deployed SQL Server in their enterprises. Although we had CALs (Client Access Licenses) and prices for servers combined with those CALs, customers told us they wanted to be able to buy versions of SQL Server that were targeted to the projects they wanted to deploy. As a result, we came out with the per-CPU pricing that lets customers scale their SQL Server pricing along with the cost of the application and the capability of the project that they have. We've found that many customers have embraced the new pricing model. And we're not the only ones who have gone to that model; you're seeing our competition move toward that model as well.

SQL Server Magazine: Do you think that SQL Server 2000 pricing has affected upgrades from SQL Server 7.0 and 6.5?

Mangione: I don't believe we've seen any impact on upgrades from a licensing perspective. If anything, we're seeing the upgrade rate to SQL Server 2000 far outpacing upgrade rates that we've seen for previous SQL Server releases.

SQL Server Magazine: SQL Server 2000 is one of Microsoft's first-generation .NET Enterprise Servers. But a lot of confusion still surrounds Microsoft's .NET strategy and where SQL Server fits in. Can you help clarify what .NET means to the SQL Server community?

Mangione: SQL Server is now XML-enabled and is the foundation server product upon which you build your .NET XML Web Services. SQL Server is at the heart of storage for all XML Web Services, which are at the heart of .NET. With .NET, we're opening up our platform to a whole set of services and devices by embracing XML standards that the industry has defined. This strategy differs from the strategies we've had in the past in that so much of application development with .NET is based on interoperability with other devices and other services in a clear, documented, standard way. Web Services provides a well-defined way to develop, deploy, and manage applications on the Web and to open up these services to other applications. By combining all these Web services, you can build complex applications by using very simple, industry-standard concepts. We've also done work with tools, such as the SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol] Toolkit, to help make it even easier for you to develop XML services.

SQL Server Magazine: With XML at the core of the .NET strategy, will SQL Server evolve in an un-SQL direction? We've heard of some database vendors that are building database-management systems based on XML. But the verbose nature of XML doesn't seem to lend itself to an efficient database system. For example, XPATH queries read XML documents sequentially, and many XML functions don't have the efficient processing of a SQL-specialized database. With all the sophistication in today's relational database management systems (RDBMSs), is the idea of XML as a DBMS a step backward?

Mangione: Hundreds and hundreds of man-years of effort have gone into tuning and building relational database systems to make them the most efficient ways to store, retrieve, and query information. We believe that the right way to use XML in an RDBMS is to actually let you store XML deeper in the database, which enables you to run queries against the database but also to take advantage of all the richness that's within the database itself. So many developers today understand how to build SQL applications, and we're going to continue to make massive investments in that area.

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