SQL Server Magazine

Dave Campbell, a Microsoft technical fellow in the Data and Platform division and SQL Server raconteur, met with Karen Forster and me for a lively discussion about SQL Server—past, present, and future. We quizzed him about SQL Server 2008’s features and SQL Server’s path to the cloud. Campbell’s comments about SQL Services, the upcoming Kilimanjaro release, and the Madison project illuminate changes on the horizon in the way you’ll deal with data.

SQL Server Magazine: Did you know that February is the 10th anniversary of SQL Server Magazine?
Campbell: Pretty exciting! Congratulations.

SQL Server Magazine: Thanks! What about SQL Server 2008 excites you most?
Campbell: I’m excited about the amount of features we were able to get into it in less than three years. The story behind the story is that we completely redesigned the process for how we make SQL Server. We envisioned a world with millions of servers and millions of enterprise database servers. Then we redesigned the product with that in mind, to make it take care of itself and to make it much easier to care for.

SQL Server Magazine: What was your role in this process?
Campbell: In SQL Server 2005, I ran a good chunk of the product development team. I went to Paul Flessner [then the vice president of Microsoft’s Data and Storage division] when we were getting ready to ship SQL Server 2005 and said, "Hey we’re no longer chasing tail lights. We’re in the leaders’ pack now, and there are a bunch of things we can do to distinguish ourselves from the others." I put together a team that looked at the market, the needs of our customers and ISVs, how we built the product, and the return on our engineering investment. We prioritized things, such as merge statements, that people had requested for a long time, and got them done.

We noticed that space and time would become integral data types going forward, so we added support for spatial data types in SQL Server 2008. We also noticed that even though SQL Server is easier than a lot of other database products to manage server-per-server, managing thousands of SQL Servers was still a lot of work. So that’s how policy-based management came about. It really reduces the administrative burden if you can define a few classes of service (the mission-critical server, the workgroup server, the tier-2 server, the one that’s under someone’s desk), define policies for those classes, bind those servers to one of those classes, and make sure that they remain in compliance.

SQL Server Magazine: What are the big trends you’re seeing in data management?
Campbell: There are three things to think about. We’re entering a world in which the cost of acquiring data is going to zero. Everything is born digital today. The cost of storing data is approaching media cost. The final thing is ubiquitous connectivity and increase in bandwidth. Those three things together are transformative.

SQL Server Magazine: What impact will lower storage costs have on SQL Server?
Campbell: People need the right data, in the right form, in the right place, at the right time. CIOs and CTOs want to know if we can do it faster and cheaper than the other guys. There are some areas in the data warehouse market where we have not seriously gone . . . yet.

SQL Server Magazine: Are you referring to the Madison project?
Campbell: We see more businesses not wanting to throw data away, so they’re building larger data warehouses. The ability to collect, mine, analyze, and provide information back to the business can be the difference between success and failure. The Madison project, which is the work we’ve done with the DATAllegro acquisition, is going to let us get into the market in the data warehousing space into the hundreds of terabytes. The volume is staggering. I think that as people store more and purge less often, they can analyze things over time and look for historical trends. These trends are the basis by which we do predictive analytics to infer correlations over time and predict into the future.

SQL Server Magazine: How does Kilimanjaro fit into this picture?
Campbell: The other half of the story is how do we take the data and the information in the large data warehouse and get it out to the people who are actually doing the work and making decisions every day. We want to enable both the very large data warehouses and self-service business intelligence (BI). It’s not just enough to produce the reports; it’s about putting information in the end-user’s and information analyst’s hands so they can slice it and dice it, and add information that may only be available from their workgroup. A major theme of the Kilimanjaro release is self service.

SQL Server Magazine: In addition to self service, what are the other elements of Kilimanjaro?
Campbell: In Kilimanjaro, SQL Server will have greater than 64 hardware thread support in the relational engine. Another theme is multi-server management. Consider friction in terms of self service. Can you provision servers easily? For companies that have hundreds or thousands of SQL Servers, the multiserver management aspect of Kilimanjaro will enable the administrator to manage them all as a unit.

SQL Server Magazine: Can you discuss why SQL Server and storage are in the same division at Microsoft?
Campbell: That’s on purpose! Go back to my point that all data is born digital. Things that aren’t properly stored in the database directly still need the accountability and control that you want in a database. The unstructured data world and the structured data world are coming together. There are three motivating forces for this: One is that there are just so many of these unstructured data things. Wouldn’t you like a database to manage all the files on your computer, for example? The second is that unstructured data often has other attributes. For example, attributes of instant message [IM] conversations include the person it’s from, the person it’s to, and the date. The third is feature extraction. We can do text indexing of that IM conversation. There’s value in being able to query over it.