Microsoft Presents Unified Data Model At Heart Of New World

Microsoft

As expected, Microsoft executives used TechEd to talk up a world in which all data types will have attributes and "all will be reliably stored, searched, filtered and sorted," said Pat Helland, a SQL Server architect at Microsoft.

"Chunky things--like BLOBs [binary large objects, files, e-mail--will all get attributes and will be more relational in behavior," Helland said.

Once all the data is in structured storage, "you can do all sorts of software [to manage, search and make the data available," he said.

Currently, the major database vendors--IBM, Oracle and Microsoft--are racing to cram more ability to store, manage and view XML data in relational databases. The next versions of IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle 9i promise to store both XML and relational data and make it viewable in either XML or relational format, analysts said.

In a keynote long on vision and short on details, Paul Flessner, senior vice president of MIcrosoft's .Net Enterprise Servers division, reaffirmed the company's commitment to make the next version of SQL Server, code-named Yukon, the basis of the data store in Exchange Server.

With Yukon, messages can go in "a rich structured store that can be backed up, managed and that's very much in our road map," Flessner said.

He and Helland sketched in a computing worldview that places service centers using inexpensive, standard hardware components, cheap disk storage and dirt-cheap networking as the purveyors of the next generation of Web services and applications. In short, every component of this platform, except the software, is a commodity.

Microsoft needed to broadly sketch in what its architecture of the future is all about, said Tom Murphy, an analyst at Meta Group. "This is an abstract model, but Microsoft has heavy brain power," he said.

Yukon is still on track to ship in 2003, said Stan Sorensen, director of SQL Server product management at Microsoft.