Sphinx solves mass market riddle

Microsoft sees data warehousing as the future of the database and isuse market and target small businesses. targeting version 7.0 of its SQL Server database at the mass market.

It will add a raft of new decision support features to the database, codenamed Sphinx, to try to appeal to the mass data warehousing sector.

The aim is to make the offering as easy to install, deploy and use as possible, in order to woo small and medium-sized companies.

As a result, another important goal is to make the database easy to manage, so that administrators can spend more time on challenging tasks rather than routine jobs.

William Baker, Microsoft's product unit manager for the decision support product unit, said: "The data warehouse is the future of the database and the market is growing at 40 per cent each year compared to the database's four per cent. The needs and requirements of the data warehouse will be the same as those driving the database forward, but these have so far been very esoteric. Our aim is to make it easy to design, build, manage and use cost-effective data warehouse solutions using SQL Server and Windows."

A key plank to this strategy of proliferating the data warehouse is Microsoft's Zero Administration Server initiative. This tries to automate all routine operations in the database, or when this is not possible, provide 25 wizards to make writing routines easier.

Meanwhile, similar ease of use features will also be added to Microsoft's new Plato online transaction processing offering, Decision Support Services (DSS), which will come only with the Standard and Enterprise versions of SQL Server.

Such features include the ability to query Plato in English rather than SQL and the choice to store only selected combinations of queries in a multi-dimensional database, to cut down on the immense amount of time currently spent writing aggregations. Also, the ability to choose whether to store data in a relational or multi-dimensional database, or a mixture of the two is included.

Usage analysis tools will also be provided, which register queries into a log and then analyse them, so that administrators can optimise the system for the busiest time or establish which aggregations are the most popular so they can prioritise them.

Plato will be completely integrated into SQL Server and the Back Office family of products, and will not be sold as a standalone server, which means existing users from the offering's former days with Panorama Software will be forced to move to SQL Server.

Amir Netz, Microsoft's lead developer for Plato, said: "We want to make Olap (Online Analytical Processing) and data warehousing ubiquitous. Olap is becoming more popular, but the pricetag and the current cost of consulting is enormous. We want to make Plato affordable, so we won't introduce a different pricing structure from SQL Server. This will make it between 10 and 20 times cheaper than rival offerings."

But, to ensure it can provide an end user query tool, Microsoft is adding its OLEDB for Olap application programming to the next version of Excel.

This means customers will be able to access Plato via the spreadsheet.

Version 1.0 of DSS will not support Microsoft's clustering technology, however, and users will not be able to access data from IBM's DB2, AS/400, Informix or Sybase databases using native OLEDB drivers until release 2.0. Oracle support will be provided immediately.

Microsoft claims it has already tested databases from 500 out of an expected 800 US customers to ensure backwards compatibility. It also intends to spend $20m in a bid to attract interest in the product. The money will be used to subsidise training courses for up to 50,000 database administrators worldwide.

SPHINX: DECISION SUPPORT FOR SQL 7.0

Sphinx will include dynamic memory and disk space management, and an improved Enterprise Manager for multiserver installations. This comes as a Microsoft Management Console snap-in, so it has the same look and feel as the rest of the Back Office family of products. Agent technology has also been added, which can report back to a central server on whether a job has been a success or failure.

A mobile version of the database for sales staff will also be incorporated in the current line-up, which includes a Standard and Enterprise Edition.

This will act as a back end to Office 2000 applications, requiring 2-4MB of memory and 32MB of hard disk space. It will provide bidirectional replication to ensure mobile workers have access to the most current information.