Content area
Full text
It's been five years since DM Review interviewed Bill Baker, general manager of business intelligence for SQL server at Microsoft. Nigh onto his 10th anniversary at Microsoft, Baker has held pretty much the same position throughout his tenure, though the sands have never stopped shifting under his feet. Prohibited from certain project work early on by a non-compete clause from his former bosses at Oracle, Baker honed his understanding of middleware and data access components until he could return to his twin passions of databases and business intelligence. As time marched on, a small group at Microsoft - much smaller than its industry competitors - moved from iconoclast to the mainstream. SQL 7.0 gave way to SQL Server 2000 and the BI industry, rising on a wider tide, came into its own. That was a long time ago. Now it's prime time once again. As this article lands on desks, SQL Server 2005 is landing on loading docks with dozens of early customers already in production. Soon to follow will be more than 200 local, regional and international launch events for SQL as well as the new VisualStudio 2005 and BizTalk 2006 server. All the speculation about features and gripes about delays are officially moot. Now it's time to deliver, albeit in a more secure BI environment. "You look around and see competitiveness, globalization, compliance," says Baker. "There are just so many things going on in the market today that make people want business intelligence, making them find it even if they didn't know what it was, making them want it more even if they did." A fertile marketplace doesn't come without requirements, and Microsoft has gone to pains to tune the 2005 release. One change upfront was to move focus from huge beta releases to more frequent drops to the core users that tend to deliver the most valuable input. "We've done a series of community technology previews, which are more frequent than beta releases and provide an amazing amount of really good feedback," Baker says. "We've found a way to home in on a really key audience," which includes developers, administrators and information workers. In the Studio
Some of this feedback resulted in SQL Server Management Studio, which replaces Enterprise Manager and...