Microsoft’s SQL Server Game Plan Continues Apace

And Yukon, the planned merged data store for both SQL Server and the Microsoft Exchange mail system, is slated to go to beta testing in the second half of next year, said Gordon Mangione, vice president of SQL Server for Microsoft.

Key software developers like Siebel Systems and server makers like Unisys, Dell, and NEC have early beta code for the 64-bit version of the database. However, that database is not likely to hit full stride until servers featuring Intel's McKinley chip are released to the market, probably in the second half of next year, Mangione added. McKinley is the next generation of Intel's currently available 64-bit Itanium microprocessor.

As for Yukon, Microsoft had to make, "a big bet on SQL Server" as the storage platform, Mangione said. Some onlookers said that is a tacit admission by the company that Exchange Server was not the optimal platform for enterprise mail systems and even validates the recent move by Oracle to pitch its Oracle 9i database and application server as the plumbing for mail systems. Large accounts have long complained that Exchange is resource-intensive and slow, while Oracle paints the Microsoft mail system as vulnerable to security threats and viruses.

The news comes just as database rival Oracle prepares a preview of Project XDB, technology that will theoretically provide better support for XML data within Oracle's relational database. Oracle plans to talk about Project XDB, as well as version 2 of Oracle 9i Application Server, this week at Oracle Openworld in San Francisco.

While IBM, Microsoft and Oracle all claim to support XML data in their databases, that support so far mostly requires a conversion or "shredding" of that XML data into the row-and-column format of relational databases.

"Over time, we are striving to do less shredding," Mangione said.

Both IBM and Microsoft claim full support for proposed W3C standard XQL query language while Oracle continues to support SQL extensions that map XML documents to their relational counterparts.

Whatever their levels of XML support, all three competitors maintain that the ability to handle XML within the relational database is critical.

IBM recently launched an Information Integration initiative in its Silicon Valley research and development lab to help users handle both relational and XML data wherever it resides.

And executives at the big three database companies agreed that the best way to handle XML is by stretching existing relational databases to embrace it.

"Usually, business apps, be they Oracle [or] SAP, are in the business of moving purchase orders and invoices between companies. When information gets to the other end, if I have SAP, the first thing it wants to do is put [that information] in a database. Will it find a separate XML store or a database that they currently use? I'd vote for the latter," said Jeremy Burton, senior vice president of product and services marketing for Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif.

Nelson Mattos, a distinguished engineer at IBM's Data Management Solutions group, agreed. Native XML stores will face the same fate object-relational databases did several years ago, he said. At that time, a raft of smaller companies, like Ontos and Object Design, pitched native object databases as the optimal way to handle multimedia and other nontraditional "object" data.

But relational databases from IBM and Oracle were stretched and prodded so they could handle that data along with traditional relational information.