Microsoft Makes Data First-Class for Developers - What SQL Server Needs (
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Meanwhile,
David Campbell, a Microsoft Technical Fellow, working in the Data
Storage Platform division, said he has specialized in how developers
work with data—having been with the SQL Server team for 14 years—after
coming from Digital Equipment Corp. "We've extended SQL Server down to
devices and scaled up to large servers, and now are building a cloud
service. And we support all types of data—from just relational to BLOB
[Binary Large Objects] to now integrated," Campbell said
In SQL Server 2008, two new things appear—support for spatial data
and file stream support, he said. The new release also supports a
broader array of operations over the data, including the ability to
integrate, analyze, visualize, report on and synchronize the data,
Campbell said.
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"The thing with SQL Server is it's a database product, but what's in
the box is a BI [business intelligence] platform as well," Campbell
said. "There are reporting services in the box. We're making BI be more
real-time and embedding it in applications."
Meanwhile, at Tech-Ed, Microsoft is announcing Velocity, a
distributed explicit, coherent cache, "to place a cache above the
database and the application," which can be integrated with ASP.Net as
a session cache, Campbell said.
Velocity is most like Oracle's Tangosol technology, Campbell said.
Oracle acquired Tangosol last year. Tangosol's Coherence product, now
subsumed into Oracle simply as Tangosol, provides a proven, reliable
in-memory data-grid technology designed to meet the new demands for
real-time data analytics, compute intensive middleware and
high-performance transactions—often referred to as XTP (Extreme
Transaction Processing). Memcached is a similar solution in the open
source world, Campbell said.
"Tangosol is probably the closest in terms of what it'll [Velocity]
look like," Campbell said. "And if you know .Net, you'll know
Velocity," he said, noting that it will be integrated into the platform.
"The issue is the reduction of latency and getting data from one
place to another," Campbell said. "We have to design as if the cost of
storage has gone to zero," he said.
Primarily, "it's a matter of getting the right data in the right
form at the right time," Campbell said. That is what Microsoft is
delivering. And customers such as NewsGator are buying. NewsGator is
using SQL Server 2008 to manage 2.5 billion articles, Microsoft
officials said.