Microsoft Struggles To Get Yukon Beta Out The Door

Microsoft has promised the first real beta of its next-generation database for the first half of the year. Depending on how first half is defined, that gives the company just over a month. Company sources said the push is on internally to deliver a beta drop by June 1, just in time for the TechEd conference in Dallas.

But "recent metrics show that might not happen," said one insider.

Stan Sorensen, Director of SQL Server Product Management said Microsoft remains on track to ship the Yukon beta in June, but he's not committing to the first of that month.

Not that it matters much. With IT spending still stalled and Microsoft beating the Windows 2003/Office 2003 drum, companies of all sizes have enough upgrades to consider for now, industry observers said. Windows Server 2003 shipped late last month, and Office 2003 is expected to ship late this summer.

Yukon, which has been in the works for years, will use the foundation file-storage technology for future Microsoft operating systems and applications, the company has said. After the SQL Slammer worm took down Microsoft databases around the world earlier this year, the vendor put Yukon on hold to focus on bolstering security in existing products. Since then, Microsoft has stopped pledging shipment of the database for late 2003.

"We were so fervent [about security] that we stopped work on Yukon development," said Gordon Mangione, vice president for SQL Server at Microsoft.

The goal of Yukon is to provide a basis for scalable, secure applications and to offer better backup and restore, replication and "secure by default" settings that are becoming the vogue in Microsoft products. (Visit Microsoft's Web site for more information.)

Microsoft also has promised to bolster Yukon with support for native XML; support for user-defined schemas; Xquery, the emerging XML query standard; and reporting and enhanced business intelligence capabilities such as OLAP and data mining. (See story.)

The reporting services will give users report authoring, management and delivery capabilities, the company said, and Microsoft plans to release a beta version of those services in the first half of this year. The plan now is to offer these services as part-and-parcel of the database, much as Microsoft now offers its analysis services. But if the analytics or reporting services are used against a non-Microsoft database, there will be a charge, said Product Manager Sheryl Tullis.

Partners have cited all of those capabilities, plus Yukon's support of the Common Language Runtime (CLR), as key perks. CLR support means developers can keep using their existing toolset to build database applications. Earlier this year, Microsoft also said the database will incorporate the company's IntelliSense autocompletion technology and Visual SourceSafe source code.

Yukon represents a major offensive by Microsoft to implant and entrench SQL Server in the enterprise. The current 64-bit version of SQL Server 2000, which just shipped, is another step along that path. In the enterprise, Microsoft faces prodigious competition from Oracle and IBM.

One partner that works with both Microsoft and IBM said Microsoft views IBM as its biggest rival in this space, even though Oracle retains the market lead in high-end distributed databases.

Mangione agreed with that assessment. "The biggest thing separating IBM and Microsoft is that IBM wants to be the one-stop shop and provide hardware, services and software. We're a partner-led company. We live and die on the success of our partnering model."

Of course, IBM would beg to differ. The company has pushed hard to be viewed as a platform provider for various ISVs that might view Microsoft as a threat. In that effort, IBM has garnered support from such software vendors as J.D. Edwards, SAP and PeopleSoft, and has pledged to stay out of the application arena, while Microsoft forges ahead with CRM, ERP and other business applications that pose competition to partners.