SQL 7.0 should help Microsoft cement its NT database software market lead

Abstract

Microsoft Corp. is working to cement its leadership position in Windows NT-based database software by increasing the magnitude and enhancing the features of its SQL Server database management system software. In January, Microsoft announced SQL Server 7.0's 2nd beta release, an upgraded version of SQL Server 6.5 with enhanced features, including greater scalability, improved data warehousing and easier management.

Microsoft is working to cement its leadership position in Windows NT-based database software by increasing the magnitude and enhancing the features of its SQL Server database management system (DBMS) software.

In January, Microsoft announced SQL Server 7.0's second beta release, an upgraded version of SQL Server 6.5 with enhanced features, including greater scalability, improved data warehousing and easier management.

Microsoft expects this product to increase its commanding market share for NT-based DBMS software from its current share, which analyst firm IDC estimates to be 44 percent. Other DBMS software that runs on NT includes Oracle 7.3, IBM DB2, Sybase System 11, Informix Universal Server and Computer Associates' Open Ingress. Oracle is currently closest in market share for NT-based DBMS software at 28 percent, according to IDC.

Some of the new features incorporated in SQL Server 7.0 are:

Enhanced query processor

Parallel query

Distributed query

Enhanced indexing

Multiple triggers

Big/smart I/O

Unicode

New page and row formats

Data type changes

Dynamic row-level locking

Better backup, restore, DBCC and bulk copy utilities.

Of the improvements, the most significant include the query enhancements, greater UO, support of Unicode data types, improved backup and restore utilities, replication APIs and an expanded database size.

Query enhancement

The redesigned query processor supports large databases and complex queries through use of hash join, merge join and hash aggregation techniques. The SQL 7.0 query processor uses fast sampling to extract and regather statistics. It will also support parallel execution of a single query over multiple processors enabling SQL 7.0 to perform query execution.

Universal Access, using OLE DB technology, enables SQL 7.0 to perform distributed queries for access to data in multiple SQL Servers, heterogeneous databases (DB/2, Oracle), file systems, or in other network sources such as directories and index servers.

Improved VO

We expect SQL 7.0 will have improved I/O capability in database page size. Microsoft officials say page size will increase from 2K to 8K with a maximum of 8,060 bytes per row. There should be improvements in both character type limit (from 255 bytes to 8,000 bytes) and columns per table (from 250 to 1,024). These changes will enable SQL Server 7.0 to handle much larger databases.

Unicode support

SQL 7.0 will support Unicode data types, making it easier to store multi-language data. There is no need to convert characters because Unicode stores characters using two bytes and can accommodate even languages with large numbers of characters, such as Chinese.

Backup

Backup utilities have improved in that you can perform incremental backups capturing only the pages that have changed since the last database backup. This will be a timesaver as well as a performance improvement because the server will spend less effort rolling unchanged transactions forward.

SQL 7.0 backup restoration automatically creates the database and all necessary files, making the process easier. SQL 7.0 supports the Microsoft Tape Format so backup files can be stored on the same media as other backups.

Replication APIs

SQL Server 6.5 can replicate to any ODBC-compliant database, while replication to SQL Server 6.5 from a non-SQL Server database requires a custom solution. With SQL Server 7.0, the replication APIs are made public so that independent software vendors can implement bi-directional replication solutions.

Expanded database size According to Microsoft officials, SQL Server 7.0 expands database size from ITB on SQL 6.5 to 1,048,516 terabytes on SQL 7.0. This increase in conjunction with SQL 7.0's ability to shrink or grow databases automatically enables SQL Server 7.0 to meet many very large database (VLDB) demands while providing easier management.

Other issues

Up to now, Microsoft has been focusing on implementing these new features into SQL 7.0 and has not concentrated on performance optimization. As such, performance testing results for SQL 7.0 are not available.

However, for SQL 6.5 there has been significant improvement irs performance. The change in tpmC performance is outstanding, from 2,454 tpmC two years ago to 14,900 tpmC today. This performance improvement is reflected in the price/performance rates as well, reducing it to oneeighth of the price performance from two years ago. Microsoft officials say that as of January, the best price/performance result in the industry - $29.55/tpmC was achieved with Microsoft SQL Server, Enterprise Edition 6.5.

Microsoft continues to attract new customers to Windows NT and SQL Server, but new customers are only part of SQL Server's market. Microsoft is finding its major market in its huge installed base of MS Access customers who are upsizing to SQL Server. In addition, by providing ease of use, scalability and innovative technology that is cost-effective and quicker, SQL Server has also attracted customers running Unix-based environments. By continuing to meet the DBMS needs of its Windows NT customers, Microsoft should easily maintain its leadership position in the NT-based DBMS software market.