Karls Blog

 

Today we change the game, again!

 

We entered this market 15 years ago as the number 5 player in a field of 4 competitors.  Today only 2 of those competitors remain, IBM and Oracle, and we sell more units of SQL Server each year than both of them combined.

 

To Be Clear – SQL Server is the market leader and today we shipped the product that will widen our lead!

 

SQL Server is now ready for our customers’ most demanding mission critical business applications.  We are releasing a product that will change the economics of this market forever.  We can now service the most demanding business applications in the world at a lower price and a much lower total cost of ownership.

 

Today we change the rules by introducing the most integrated Business Intelligence platform in the market.  Oracle and IBM don’t even come close in terms of functionality or the level of integration we provide with Analysis Services, Integration Services and Reporting Services/Report Builder.  Well, Oracle will claim they do but they also say they are unbreakable. J

 

Today we put into the market a database that has unprecedented developer productivity and flexibility.  Our integration of the CLR provides the flexibility developers demand and our integration with Visual Studio provides the productivity developers need to meet the demands of today’s fast moving businesses. 

 

Let’s take a quick look at just some of the things we put into SQL Server 2005 for our customers.

 

Enterprise Readiness:

Multi-platform support: X32, X64 (WoW and native), IA64 Native, Numa Aware

Multi-instance support with 7.0, 2000 and of course 2005

Mobile, Tablet, Express (free), Workgroup, Standard and Enterprise – If we don’t have it, you don’t need it…

Table Partitioning – partition by key easily – drop a partition and add a new one, no need to delete millions of rows

Upgrade Advisor – (scan your existing 7.0 and 2000 servers and SP’s and get ready for an easy upgrade)

SQL Server Management Studio – built in the VS IDE and able to manage all services from one UI

Enhanced Full Text Search – Integrated backup/restore, thesaurus support, 100x faster for index build

ONLINE: index build, page/file restore, concurrent log and db backup, memory add, fast recovery (online during rollback) – all operations on-line…

Column level encryption

Off-by-default – reduced attack space

Code signing

Vastly improved diagnostics – Watson dumps allow us to fix 80%+ of customer issues – NO CUSTOMER REPRO -, Dedicated admin thread, Dynamic Management Views (see current server activity)

Database Snapshots – point-in-time query and reporting

IPV6 support

No more “general network error” – specific error messages for all errors.

Automatic replication of schema changes

Merge replication 2-5x faster

Built-in Oracle to SQL Server replication – the only way to go….

HTTPS synch for mobile users

 

Integrated BI:

BI Developer Studio – unique end-to-end integrated developer experience inside VS

Report Builder – powerful new report design tool for end users with built-in auto drill-through

UDM for AS – redefines OLAP and analytics

IS – high performance and enterprise scale data integration pipeline – truly an ETL competitor

Reporting Services in Express and Workgroup – take that MySQL

RS controls for VS – developers will love this.

IS – support for web services and XML sources

AS Proactive Caching – automatically process cubes when data changes in the RDBMS

10 New Data Mining algorithms – critical mass for data mining applications

IS – support for data quality, data mining and text mining – going beyond ETL

AS now supports multi-instance and integration with SQL profiler

AS – new KPI framework for defining and displaying KPI’s – business analysts will love this feature.

 

Developer Productivity:

T-SQL exception handling – finally!

Service Broker – breakthrough for building loosely coupled web services applications via reliable messaging

MARS – Multiple Active Result Sets (easier to migrate those Oracle and IBM apps to SQL Server)

Snapshot Isolation – we have the most comprehensive set of isolation levels in the industry

Query Notification and CacheSync – Integrated with ASP.Net for much improved performance and easier to code

CLR Integration – Language choice - User defined types/aggregates, User defined procedures/triggers

End to End XML – Datatype, XQuery, XML indexing, XSD typing, XML showplan, XML editor best in class, 2x client perf improvement

Large Row support

Persisted computed columns

Distributed Query Tracing

New Query Functions: pivot, unpivot, apply, except, intersect, TOP(n)

Notification Services – easy to embed into new and existing applications

SOAP/HTTP connectivity to the server

ADO.Net tracing

SNAC – no more MDAC versioning issues!!!

 

What about Quality? 

40x more stress testing hours that SQL Server 2000: 3900 machine hrs vs 150,800 in 2005

Patented StackHasher exception handling testing – 100x more paths tested in 2005 vs 2000 (100,000 vs 10M)

AutoVerify tool filed 11k bugs and analyzed 182,000 dumps without human intervention, saving more than 20,000 person hours in test and reducing costly human errors

Secondary stress workload testing increased by 10x – believe me this baby can generate stress…

3-5x’s the number of functional tests

Upgraded over 1000 customer databases in our labs

The list goes on and on…

 

What about Customer Testing?

15 ISV upgrade labs around the world upgrading over 200 ISV applications to SQL Server 2005 BEFORE RTM

All of Microsoft’s core business applications run on SQL Server 2005 today, over 100 applications – Thank you MSIT we couldn’t do it without you!!!!

MSIT has 5 multi-terabyte databases in production including: MS Sales, MSO, Tax DWH, SAP, WHOS

Our SAP systems has processed more than 7 million invoices and 13.5 billion transactions on SQL Server 2005

We have over 50 customer applications in production today from all over the world

Just to name a few… (You will see more at the launch)

Barnes & Noble – 3TB data warehouse on a 64b machine

Experian – largest AS cube with 15m rows and 300 attributes

Nestle SA – Integrated reporting solution based on AS

NASDAQ – 5,000 txs/sec and over 100k queries / day on a trade summary system

Mediterranean Shipping – 50 million txs / day running their most mission critical shipping application 24x7

Xerox – 7 million txs / day

Texas Instruments said “If for some reason SQL Server 2005 would not ship I would keep the Beta code in my production system for ever” - no worries TI we shipped TODAY!!!

 

Does SQL Server 2005 scale and is it fast?

TPC-C

1P – world record price/performance at $0.99/tpmC (first to break the $1 per transaction barrier)

2P – world record performance – only 2p result over 100k tpmC

4P -  world record performance (coming for launch)

16P - #1 on X64 chip (coming for launch)

64P – 1M tpmC – does it really matter after this???

 

TPC-H

100GB – world record performance and price/performance (coming for launch)

300GB – world record performance (coming for launch)

1TB – world record price/performance

3TB – stay tuned…

 

SAP-SD

4P – world record with 18k users

Stay tuned for a much, much bigger number (reserved for the launch)

 

Siebel

4P – world record – 20k users

16P – world record – 30k users

 

Be proud of what you have done.  We have changed the world a little bit for the better today.  We don’t get to do that many times in our career but today we did!!!