Bob Muglia opened with January 13, 1988, when the Microsoft Sybase Ashton-Tate SQL Server program was launched. Apparently Bill Gates was very nervous about the speech at the time, but Steve Ballmer jumped up and down like a chear-leader. WOW. He’s holding a box with 51/4 and 31/2 inch floppy disks (yeah, I’m old enough to know what he’s talking about, kids, ask your grand-dad). Mr. Muglia just said that there were limitations to the product. That’s an odd thing to hear from a software company. Nice to hear it though.
He’s showing how 128 differnt machines can be added to the system. They’ve got some kind of load generator that is maxing out 128 processors. Then they jumped it up to 192 processors. You’d be surprised how little space 192 processors takes up. Microsofts goal is to grow the product and make it available for BI applications. Good news for their future. They now hold the world record for TPC-E at 2012 tbsE AND the price performance record at the same time.
They’re announcing the CTP of SQL Server 2008 R2 to be delivered this month. They’re adding new versions of SQL Server too, SQL Server 2008 R2 Datacenter and SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse (formerly called “Madison”).
Mr. Muglia is showing how the data center is changing, largely through virtualization. The demo is on Live Migration through the Virtual Machine Manager. They’re migrating SQL Server from one node to another. They’re pretty insistent that HyperV can compete with VMWare in performance, especially in I/O. They’re moving the virtual machine while under load, without losing connections. Ooooh, aaaaah, special. That really does make a change in how you can manage a system.
Mr. Muglia is now showing how private clouds are changing the environment. Windows Azure is now going to be displayed. He’s trying to differentiate between client/server, web and service oriented architectures. They’re all way to much the same. Now clouds… they’re different. But, not that different. Structured or unstructured data, is still data. You’re going to access & store a lot of it the same way as you did before. He’s also talking about public clouds and how they’re going to expand and change the environment. But, hey, Microsoft doesn’t care how you use the cloud, they’ve got something to sell you for it. 35 to 100 THOUSAND servers inside these clouds. Yes, you can defend running everything yourself when you’re running at a scale like that.
To say the least, all these changes in technology, even if the data is still roughly the same, are absolutely going to require you to grow and change within your role as a developer, DBA or sys admin.