Content area
Full text
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-perserver, managing thousands of SQL Servers was still a lot of work. So that's how policy-based management came about. It...