News

Coming Soon: SQL Server 2008

Worldwide Partner Conference announcement promises Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 will be ready to ship by the end of September.

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• 08/01/2008

Microsoft all but made that official during its recent Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston. Fausto Ibarra, Microsoft's new director of product management for SQL Server, says he's confident that SQL Server 2008 will be ready to ship by the end of next month.

"The release candidate we have is feature complete, so our customers and partners can try out absolutely everything SQL Server offers," Ibarra tells RDN (see RDN's Q&A with Ibarra here). As far as Microsoft is concerned, that's the schedule it has been adhering to all year; the company earlier announced it would not make its original target of release by June.

Timing Questions
Not long ago, there was speculation that SQL Server 2008 might face additional delays ('Will SQL Server 2008 Slip Again?" May 15, 2008). Among those still expressing doubts about the schedule is Andrew Brust, chief of new technology at twentysix New York, who recently spoke at a meeting of the NYC .NET Developers Group. In an e-mail exchange, Brust writes, "there's mounting evidence that a Q3 RTM is the reality. "Nonetheless, Brust remains skeptical. "I'm still dubious, but that might be irrational at this point. I would, in any case, greatly prefer to see one more release candidate before RTM. That would raise my comfort level enormously."

While another release candidate is possible, Ibarra sounded comfortable with the stability of the current build. "We're getting some reports of bugs," Ibarra admits. "It's usual -- it's actually a small number. By now the product is very solid. We already have a lot of customers in production, we have a lot of applications that Microsoft is running on SQL Server 2008, including SAP -- we all get paid because of SQL Server 2008. At this point we're just in the final stages of testing."

Gartner Inc. analyst Donald Feinstein says too much is at stake for Microsoft to release the database if it has any major flaws. "They understand that bad quality is not something that they can afford," Feinstein says.

SQL Server 2011?
If Redmond maintains its historical release schedule, the next version of SQL Server will come out around 2011. Microsoft is offering scant details about what's in store, but Ibarra concedes that the next version will focus on Microsoft's strategy of easing management of content across multiple tiers, ranging from mobile devices to the cloud.

Key to that, Ibarra says, will be Project "Velocity," the data-caching software Microsoft recently released as a community technology preview, and SQL Server Data Services, a cloud-based service for storing content.

Data quality apparently is another key area of focus for SQL Server. To that end, Microsoft announced last month that it will acquire Israel-based Zoomix Inc. The little-known startup offers what it calls the Zoomix Accelerator -- server-based software that it says provides a scalable and fast approach to the synchronization of critical data.

"If any of their customers have a need for a powerful matching engine, Zoomix has a pretty interesting product," says Forrester Research Inc. analyst Rob Karel. "It's relatively new; they have some customers but for the most part it's really an early-stage technology that Microsoft acquired."

It remains to be seen whether Microsoft's key goal was to acquire the product or the team and presence in Israel, adds Gartner's Feinstein. "Instead of buying a major vendor of data quality, they bought a development team in Israel," Feinstein says. "It'll pay off in that they get the product that they have to date, but they also get the developers out of it."