Microsoft Adds New Technology To SQL Server

This technology, downloadable from the Web, will enable solution providers to create applications tapping into a wide array of data,not necessarily in SQL Server itself,and relay it to users via instant messaging, cell phones or e-mails, said Mitch Gatchalian, product manager for SQL Server.

"You can specify which data you're interested in and specify a threshold point at which the message gets fired off," said Gatchalian.

And the data need not necessarily be structured, he said. If a user is interested in news items on a given company, for example, notification services could be set up to log onto a user's favorite news sites, find the items, format them in XML, mark them up and submit them to a specified location.

The notification services run atop SQL Server 2000, and if the code runs on the same box as the database, there is no additional charge. If, for scalability reasons, the services run on a separate box, customers must pay for an additional license. A site running SQL Server Standard Edition on one machine costing $4,999, for example, would pay an additional $4,999 to run these services on a separate server, Microsoft said.

Solution providers are bullish on the technology. "This is a tremendous opportunity for anyone who wants to add value in terms of realtime information feeds," said George Brown, president of Database Solutions, a Cherry Hill, N.J., integrator.

Craig Goren, president of Centerpost, a Chicago-based ISV partner, said enterprises are building in more and more notifications. "When building a notification service on top of a plain old database, however, only about 10 percent of the work is actually implementing your enterprise's specific business rules," he said.

"The other 90 percent of the work is non-value-add plumbing. . . . [This product provides a framework for that 90 percent, so enterprises just need to focus on their business rules."