Forrester Research has named Microsoft a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Database Management Systems, Q2 2009. (June 2009). Forrester writes that Microsoft is “The most aggressive DBMS vendor with a strong road map.” In this Wave, Forrester categorizes Leaders as offering “broad set of functionality to support any critical transactional application.”
Analyst Noel Yuhanna acknowledges that Microsoft “over the past three years has shown increasing focus and commitment to going after the enterprise market.” And that SQL Server 2008 has “enabled Microsoft to take market share in moderately sized to large enterprises, delivering good performance, scalability, security, and availability functionality.” The report continues on to say that “Five years ago, hardly any enterprises ran multi-terabyte databases with SQL Server to support critical applications. Today, hundreds of enterprises are running 10-terabyte and larger transactional SQL Server databases.”
Key findings in the report include:
- Microsoft has done extremely well with its overall current offering, with high scores in database programmability, security, availability, and application/data integration.
- SQL Server is known for its easy-to-use, simplified enterprise DBMS and for delivering the best price-performance for most business applications. Many enterprises like the breadth and depth of the packaged applications SQL Server supports across various industries.
- Although SQL Server lags in distributed caching and scale-out architectures, Microsoft is adding such features in future releases. For example, “Velocity” is a distributed caching technology that supports high-volume transactions.
Read the full Forrester Research report: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/itanalyst/docs/06-30-09EnterpriseDatabaseManagementSystems.aspx.
SQL Server support for Guest Failover Clustering in a virtualization environment is now available. Guest Failover Clustering is when you create a SQL Server failover cluster inside a virtual machine where the nodes are running as a virtual machine.
With this extension of support, SQL Server customers can achieve high availability of SQL Server products when they are running in a virtualized environment. What that means is, in the event of an unplanned downtime of a SQL Server instance running in a virtual machine, another SQL Server instance running in a different virtual machine can come online almost instantaneously and prevent any major business interruptions. Another benefit of guest failover clusters is the reduction in the planned downtime of the server, with the ability to do rolling patches/updates to the guest operating system.
Guest Failover Clustering is supported for SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 in a virtual machine for Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, and SVVP certified configurations provided both of the following requirements are met:
- The Operating System running in the virtual machine (the “Guest Operating System”) is Windows Server 2008 or higher
- The virtualization environment meets the requirements of Windows 2008 Failover Clustering as documented at The Microsoft Support Policy for Windows Server 2008 Failover Clusters.
As we've talked about, in the second half of 2009 Microsoft will offer a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2008 R2. Register here. Space is limited so make sure you sign up soon!
A new 12-page whitepaper has been published from Microsoft that explains some of the common myths and misunderstandings about competitive cluster databases that could affect your organization. It examines some of the main reasons why customers will want to implement SQL Server as their database solutions. Choosing the right database technology is a crucial decision for all organizations, because the product that a company chooses will play an important role in that company’s ability to react to changes in the market. This is particularly important when companies are operating in challenging economic conditions, as is currently the case. SQL Server–based solutions compare very favorably with competitive cluster databases not only in terms of value for money, but also in terms of features and performance.
Download the competitive review of cluster databases whitepaper from here.
Hi Kirk Haselden here.
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I’m the product unit manager for Master Data Services. I’m responsible for the master data management strategy, team and product delivery at Microsoft. I manage the day to day aspects of the team, drive execution and overall product development. I have written two technical references for SAMS press on Integration Services, numerous technical articles and have 25 patents or patents pending. My team is a collection of talented developers, testers and program managers in Redmond and Denver. |
In June of 2007, Microsoft acquired a master data management software vendor known as Stratature. Since that time, the master data management team has been quietly working away turning the core capabilities of the Stratature product into a Microsoft product. We’ve kept all the important features of the product and added some critical capabilities such as a fully featured and capable Windows Communication Foundation web service. We’ve optimized the code and database. We’ve done the security work that all Microsoft products must do to ship. We’ve also added a few other capabilities that customers have requested. As was announced at TechEd Monday, we’re now getting ready to ship the product as Master Data Services in the SQL Server 2008 R2 release. Let me explain what Master Data Services (MDS) is and why it’s critical in today’s enterprise.
As corporate information ecosystems become more complex, so goes the management of company lists. Master lists are used, accessed, managed, changed and unfortunately corrupted in myriad ways throughout the company in various divisions and in various locations. For example, customer data may be used in the front office for direct contact with customers or in the back office in marketing, billing and other business processes. ERP and CRM systems do a great job of providing the functionality around how you use say, the product master or customer master. That’s what they were designed to do. However, they don’t do a great job of actually managing the forces that impact the master data itself. Four of the most important of those forces are decay, conflict, corruption and inconsistency.
- Decay is when the world changes around the data. The data was accurate at one time, but then the world changed but the data wasn’t updated to reflect that change. The classic example is when a customer moves.
- Conflict is when duplicate data is introduced into the system. The data may exactly duplicate or differ substantially from established and validated data. In either case, it is usually although not always undesirable. A good example is when two identical parts manufactured in different locations have different part numbers.
- Corruption is when established, accurate and validated data is changed in some way that invalidated it. For example, if the price of an PVC elbow joint is misquoted as $550 instead of $5.50, it won’t sell much.
- Inconsistency is when the data is formed in unpredictable, erratic or incompatible ways. For example, a company may have a different naming convention for their product codes depending on the division or country where the product is generated. Not using the same canonical address format is another typical example.
Traditional applications manage master data and these forces insufficiently. What is needed to solve these problems is an application that focuses on managing these forces with a set of tools that is specifically designed to ensure that the master data remains authoritative, is available in a secure way across the enterprise and is integrated with the applications that use it. Often the term “One source of the truth” is used to describe what master data management applications deliver. I prefer the term “authoritative source of master data”. Having one source isn’t always desirable nor is it always realistic. Master data isn’t truth. It’s simply data that represents the world at a given time slice. The trick and it’s a difficult one, is to keep the master data authoritative. Authoritative data is reliable, represents the state of the world at the time it’s referenced and is delivered in a secure, integrated and performant way.
Why now? Why has master data management emerged as one of the top 2 or 3 initiatives on the average CIO’s mind? The answer lies somewhere in the perfect storm of economic downturn, corporate information ecosystem complexity, strict governmental regulations such as HIPAA and Sarbanes Oxley, services oriented architectures, and the recognition that solving the problem through custom solutions is extremely difficult. Investing in master data management solutions, especially in today’s difficult economic times makes dollars and sense. Master data management is an investment in cost savings, revenue recovery, human resource optimization, and capital investment efficiency.
Unlike transactional data, master data doesn’t capture one time transactions. It’s longer lasting and slowly changing, making it difficult to manage in one time processes. Master data management is a continuing effort that must be a part of the entire lifecycle of the master data from inception to deletion. Master data is involved with transactional data everywhere including business intelligence, mandatory financial reports, billing, marketing and other critical business activities. If the master data, the gas that fuels the corporate engine, is dirty, the company doesn’t run very efficiently, or at all. Find a way to clean up the fuel and that corporate engine will run more efficiently.
In addition to the DPI blog, I’ll be blogging through the coming months leading up to our release. You can find my ramblings here: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/knightreign/default.aspx. Monday, our product team site also went live: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/mds.aspx
We’re excited to be working on a solution to a problem that exists in every substantial company in the world.
Thanks,
Kirk
We are on track to release the first Technology Preview for Project “Madison” in H2 2009. A select group of customers will deploy a prototype MPP data warehouse on Madison. Download the first Project "Madison" data sheet. And, view the on demand webinar, "An Early Look at Kilimanjaro and Madison.”
At TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles, Microsoft today announced new innovations from the SQL Server team. The next release, SQL Server 2008 R2 (formerly SQL Server ‘Kilimanjaro’), will include a new feature: Master Data Services (MDS). In addition to SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft is talking about a new technology for low latency complex event processing. The first Community Technology Preview (CTP) of SQL Server 2008 R2 will be available in the second half of 2009 and we are on track to ship SQL Server 2008 R2 in the first half of calendar year 2010.
With its strong focus on business intelligence technologies (BI), SQL Server 2008 R2 will continue to offer enterprise customers exceptional value through more pervasive insight into their data. SQL Server 2008 R2 will provide new capabilities to empower end users to make better decisions through self-service BI, which translates to increased productivity and lower costs. SQL Server 2008 R2 will also include:
- Master Data Services that provides information workers with a single authoritative data source to ensure the integrity of the data they use to make critical business decisions.
- Application and Multi-Server Management that reduces the complexity of developing, deploying, and managing applications across multiple instances of SQL Server; a new central management point helps scale database management and identify consolidation opportunities.
- Support for greater than 64 logical processors that provides customers with greater choice for delivering high performance and scalability and enables customers to take advantage of multi-core technologies.
Also announced at TechEd and planned for release in 2010 is new technology for low latency complex event processing, which offers customers and partners faster time to solution and equal or better performance than competitive alternatives to gain insight from streaming information.
For additional information, please visit the SQL Server Virtual Press Room here.
TechEd 2009 is less than a week away and we are excited about another event packed with opportunities to learn, network, and share ideas. Pre-show activities are already underway, with Webcasts live and on demand on TechNet and MSDN. Make sure you catch the last Webcast on May 13th on Mastering the Microsoft SQL Server JDBC Server v2.0. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow and contribute to the chatter at TechEd using hash tag #Teched09.
Bill Veghte, senior vice president of the Windows Business, will be kicking off TechEd next Monday, May 11. Following Bill’s keynote and throughout the week we will be presenting a number of great SQL Server content opportunities– nearly 100 in all! Break-out sessions, Hands on Labs, Technical Learning Center (TLC) sessions, and online Panel discussions across 3 different tracks will be running all week, including:
- What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 (Mon May 11 from 1:00 PM-2:15 PM
- Presenter: Stephen Forte and Richard Campbell
- Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Virtualization Considerations and Best Practices (Fri May 15 from 9:00 AM-10:15 AM)
- Presenters: Lindsey Allen, Rob Reinauer
- Lower Costs and Accelerate Projects with New Data Warehousing Reference Architectures (Thu, May 14 from 2:45 PM-4:00 PM)
- Microsoft Project code name “Gemini”: Self-service Analysis and the Future of BI (Mon May 11 from 2:45 PM-4:00 PM)
- Planning and Implementing a Master Data Management Solution (Fri May 15 from 1:00 PM-2:15 PM)
- Presenter: John McAllister
- What's New in Microsoft SQL Data Services (Mon 5/11 from 4:30 PM-5:45 PM)
And of course, don’t forget to visit the Technical Learning Center, where you’ll have a chance to meet customers and partners, participate in fun contests, and take home some great giveaways.
See you in LA!
For a full list of sessions, visit the TechEd 2009 main site here.
Technorati Tags: TechEd,SQL Server,SDS,Gemini,Data Warehousing,virtualization,master data management,SQL Data Services,Azure
Today BizTalk Server 2009 is available to MSDN customers. On May 1st it will be available to everyone in — Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Spanish — on May 1.
We made substantial investments to enhance integration and connectivity to make it easier for customers to efficiently bring together data and personnel within their organization and across organizational boundaries.
Other key improvements include new and enhanced capabilities that provide customers with:
· Simple, cost-effective service-oriented architecture (SOA) connectivity.
· Increased developer productivity.
· Better visibility into data and activities.
· The ability to take advantage of the benefits of virtualization.
· Simple RFID solutions.
· Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) made easier.
BizTalk Server 2009 expands support for the latest Microsoft application platform technologies, including Windows Server 2008, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. With the expanded platform support in BizTalk Server 2009, customers can now deliver connected systems that are more flexible and manageable, as well as more cost effective to develop and maintain.
We're also releasing BizTalk Adapter Pack v2.0. The pack is part of BizTalk Server 2009 Standard and Enterprise edition and as a separate SKU. We have added two new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) based adapters – for SQL Server and Oracle E-Business Suite.
We're happy to announce that there will be no price increase over the previous edition and will ship as: Enterprise, Standard, Branch, and Developer.
To see how early adopters including Sempra, Bankdata and Xbox are already using BizTalk Server check out these new case studies: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/case-studies.aspx.
Congrats to the BizTalk team!
Additional Resources
Pricing and Licensing
Virtual Press Kit
BizTalk Adapters
We'd like to announce the Common Criteria (CC) certification of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (32 & 64 bit). SQL Server 2008 completed an IT security evaluation at the Basic Assurance Level (EAL1+) and was certified by BSI (Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationtechnik), the certifying agency of the German government. This certification is a third party verification of the extensive security of SQL Server 2008 and demonstrates Microsoft’s continued commitment to our customers’ security needs.
Such certifications are officially recognized by international agreement (the CCRA) by 25 countries that signed the agreement, including the United States and Japan. This certification is particularly significant in Japan where it makes SQL Server 2008 eligible for procurement tax discounts as a CC certified DBMS. The certification result is posted under ‘new certificates” at the BSI website: http://www.bsi.bund.de/zertifiz/zert/sigbestaet/aktuelle.htm.
SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Editions also received the following security third-party verifications:
· SQL Server 2005 SP1 at EAL1 (32 bit Enterprise Edition)
· SQL Server 2005 SP2 at EAL4+ and compliant w/NSA DBMS Protection Profile V1.1 (32 bit Enterprise Edition)
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Relevant Links:
SQL Server 2008 has launched the new Migration Solution Center. This site provides customers with prescriptive guidance and a clear process for executing successful migrations or upsizing your existing databases to SQL Server.
On this site, the freely downloadable SQL Server Migration Assistants (SSMAs) reduce the efforts required to move databases from Access, Oracle, and Sybase to SQL Server. Download these tools now and use them to perform assessments, move data and schema, and automate the process of database migrations to SQL Server.
Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2008 will be available today for customers. The Service pack is available via download here and is primarily a roll-up of cumulative updates 1 to 3, quick fix engineering updates and minor fixes made in response to requests reported through the SQL Server community. While there are no new features in this service pack, customers running SQL Server 2008 should download and install SP1 to take advantage of the fixes which increase supportability and stability of SQL Server 2008.
Customers have no reason to wait to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 and many are already taking advantage of SQL Server 2008 as a smart IT investment. In fact, there have been over 3 million downloads of SQL Server 2008 since the RTM in August. With this Service pack, Microsoft is introducing 80% fewer changes to customer configurations compared to previous SQL Server Service Pack releases. This remarkable decrease is a testament to a revised product development process and updated servicing strategy that is focused on ease of deployment while keeping customer environments stable.
With this service pack, Microsoft has made investments to ease deployment and make management of service packs more efficient. Key improvements in SP1 include Slipstream, Service Pack Uninstall and Report Builder 2.0 click-once deployment.
o Slipstream allows administrators to install SQL Server 2008 and Service Pack 1 in a single instance. This decreases the total time for an installation, including a fewer number of reboots thereby increasing productivity and deployment availability.
o Service Pack Uninstall allows administrators to uninstall the service pack separately from the database release. This feature also improves DBA productivity, reduces the cost of deployment and improves overall supportability
o Report Builder 2.0 Click Once improves the existing SQL Server end-user report authoring application by easing deployment to business users
To download the SQL Server 2008 Service Pack 1, please click here.
For more information on SQL Server 2008, please click here.
Congratulations to David DeWitt, Bob Gerber, and their colleagues at University of Wisconsin, including Jeff Naughton, our partner at UW in the Gray Systems Lab, for receiving the prestigious 2008 ACM Software System Award for their work on the Gamma Parallel Database System.
From the ACM award:
The Gamma Parallel Database System (2008)
Gamma Parallel Database System - the Software System Award for this prototype parallel relational database system, which was the first parallel database management system (DBMS) to publish results demonstrating the ability to run the same query with the same performance on larger data sets by simply adding hardware nodes. The Gamma project had a profound impact on the database field by demonstrating that scalable performance could be achieved without the use of specialized hardware. Developed by David J. DeWitt, Microsoft/University of Wisconsin-Madison (Emeritus); Robert Gerber of Microsoft; Murali Krishna of Hewlett Packard; Donovan A. Schneider of Yahoo!; Shahram Ghandeharizadeh of the University of Southern California; Goetz Graefe of Hewlett Packard; Michael Heytens of RGM Advisors; Hui-I Hsiao of IBM; Jeffrey F. Naughton of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Anoop Sharma of Hewlett Packard. The Software System Award is given to an institution or individuals recognized for developing software systems that have had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts and/or commercial acceptance
ACM Press Release
At the Professional Developer Conference 2008 Microsoft kicked off a major wave of innovation with the announcement of the Azure Services Platform. A key piece of that technology wave is SQL Data Services (SDS).
Over the last 4 months, SDS early adopters have been working with our REST service interface with its flexible entity based data model. While we’ve received a positive response on that model, we have had significant feedback asking for more direct relational database capabilities such as SQL queries, relational schema and stored procedures. Our plan has always been to provide more relational capabilities over time. What is changing is that rather than trying to expose relational capabilities through continuous invention at our REST interface level, we are going to accelerate delivery of these features by exposing SQL Server’s existing network protocol, Tabular Data Stream (TDS), directly as the service protocol. With this evolution, SDS will become the first relational database service in the market to provide customers with the ability to use existing investments in T-SQL development and use a full relational data model in the Cloud. In addition to this, SDS will enable developer agility and quick time to market by supporting the use of existing applications, tools and knowledge, while benefitting from the new distributed, cloud based functionality of SDS. This strategy enables customers to use a relational database service for their applications built on the Azure Services Platform
With the acceleration to a T-SQL based standard relational data model, we will migrate from the current SOAP and REST based Authority-Container-Entity (ACE) data model. We will announce plans for decommissioning the existing REST based SDS service when we introduce the new TDS based SDS Service. Customers who wish to expose REST based access to their SDS relational data can do so by building custom services with ADO.NET Data Services. Customers who wish to use a REST based programming model and whose needs are met with non-relational structured data storage have the option of using Windows Azure table storage which directly exposes an ADO.NET Data Services compliant REST service endpoint. We’ll be working with existing early adopter customers to provide guidance on the appropriate migration path.
SDS, with TDS support, will be available as a public CTP in mid calendar year 2009 and commercially available in the second half of calendar year 2009.
We will be announcing technical details of the TDS based SDS service at MIX 2009. For more details, please visit the SQL Data Services Team blog.
As always, we are eager to get more feedback from the community, post them here or email the team. Those interested in SDS, should also keep an eye on the SQL Data Services Developer Center for more info.
Today we are excited to announce the availability of our Community Technology Preview (CTP) for Service Pack 1 of SQL Server 2008. This scheduled servicing release addresses feedback received from many of you who have deployed SQL Server 2008 since our release back in August 2008.
We take every update to SQL Server very seriously and we are especially pleased that in reviewing the changes being made with this service pack that we have reinforced our confidence(and hopefully yours!) in the quality of the initial release of SQL Server 2008. We know that some of you wait for the first service pack of any new software product, and hopefully with this update you will have even more insight and confidence in our engineering and quality assurance practices.
We remain committed to keeping service packs contained, focusing on essential updates only, primarily a roll-up of Cumulative Update 1 to 3, Quick Fix Engineering (QFE) updates, as well as fixes to issues reported through the SQL Server community. While keeping product changes contained, we have made significant investments to ease deployment and management of service packs:
- Slipstream – You are now able to integrate the base installation with service packs (or Hotfixes) and install in a single step.
- Service Pack Uninstall – You are now able to uninstall only the service pack (without removing the whole instance)
- Report Builder 2.0 Click Once capability
We encourage you to try out SP1, and send us your feedback. We actively read all feedback and appreciate any thoughts that you might have to help us with product updates. Please go to the Connect Feedback Center to provide feedback. Continue to watch this blog for more updates.
With the upcoming general availability of SP1, it’s a good time for any of you that are still running SQL Server 2005 (or even SQL Server 2000) to take a look at the great enhancements and benefits that SQL Server 2008 provides. There are a lot of new capabilities that maybe you haven’t had a chance to explore such as Compression, Auditing, Policy Based Management, Resource Governor, Change Data Capture, Transparent Data Encryption and many more Database, Reporting, Warehousing and Analytics improvements that you can read about here.
Thanks and we look forward to releasing SP1 soon!
