Update from SQL Pass Summt
Thursday, November 20, 200812:05 pm EDT
I attended SQL PASS last year in Denver and this year’s version in Seattle is bigger and better. With the release of SQL Server 2008 this year, there’s more swagger from Microsoft and from many attendees. With the recent acquisition of DATAllegro (great product but everyone here seems to pronounce it differently) it seems like SQL Server is poised to take on bigger challenges, as evidenced by some of the promises of what’s next in Kilimanjaro, the next version of SQL Server due out in 2010.
In the keynote given by Ted Kummert, Microsoft’s Corp. VP for the Data & Storage Platform Division, there was a recurring theme: the database utility. The notion that the database, like the operating system (via virtualization) before it, could be dynamic enough to deliver service on a utility basis is overdue. While Kummert spoke about the next release of SQL Server providing MPP warehouse workloads, self-service BI, management fabrics, and cloud services, these really are key attributes of utility computing: dynamic capacity, self-provisioning, large scale manageability, and service abstraction.
xkoto’s GRIDSCALE database virtualization software fits in well and I daresay will enable more of this transformation. GRIDSCALE takes any number of databases and aggregates them together to distribute load and grow/shrink SQL processing capacity on-demand while hiding these details from applications that think they are directly connecting to a single database. When this dynamic database power is deployed with server virtualization (hypervisors) then the database utility that Kummert proclaimed becomes that much more tangible.
