InformationWeek

November 16, 1998

SQL 7.0: More Power

Scalable Microsoft upgrade works with host of products from third parties

By Stuart J. Johnston

icrosoft's launch of SQL Server 7.0 this week is an important step toward helping enterprise users build multitier applications. A host of third-party products will work with it, including management tools, enterprise software products, and analysis and reporting tools. Many of these third-party products will ship about the same time as SQL Server 7.0, which is slated to reach users and resellers next month.

Work To Do?
Still, not everyone believes Microsoft is fully ready to challenge database heavyweights like Oracle. "This release positions SQL Server as one of the up-and-coming databases, but in the high end of the enterprise, they've got a lot of work to do," says Betsy Burton, database analyst at Gartner Group Inc. "Customers need to be clear on where their needs are-and then look at what Microsoft and Oracle offer."

Microsoft's most important enterprise product of 1998 promises to be more scalable, easier to manage, and better suited for data warehousing than SQL Server 6.5-all for the same price. SQL Server 7.0 in a five-user configuration, including a new online analytical processing server, is priced at $1,399; the Enterprise Edition, with an unlimited-user license, is $28,999.

That pricing structure, and the free OLAP server, attracted environmental engineering giant CH2M Hill Inc., which is using SQL Server 7.0 to build data marts that let users track financial and project information more quickly. "Our tests indicate that the performance of SQL Server 7.0 is just as good as any other tool, the price tag is right, and they threw in the OLAP services," says Scott Crownover, project manager for data warehousing at the Denver company.

At CH2M Hill, targeted data is transferred from Oracle databases to SQL Server 7.0, where applications written using SQL Server 7.0's OLAP services will let users working at desktops around the world analyze the information. In deploying the new system, Crownover's group will also expand the capabilities provided to each user, improving access to historical data and providing more transaction details. "They can answer questions like, Which clients do they get the most profit from? and Which [markets] do we have the hardest time making money from?" Crownover says.

Microsoft has already built strong software vendor support for the upgrade. Much of that activity will focus around its OLAP services, with heavy participation from the companies that last month joined Microsoft's Data Warehousing Alliance, designed to ensure data warehouse products that work with SQL Server 7.0 can work together.

For example, Unisys this week will demonstrate its new Customer Behavior and Profitability Application by performing data mining on a 2-terabyte SQL Server 7.0 database containing records for 4 million banking customers and 10 million bank accounts. The application, due to ship later this year, uses the database's Data Transformation Services to extract customer data and the OLAP server to analyze it, applying customer behavior and profitability models against the analysis database. Next year, Unisys will migrate other applications to SQL Server 7.0.

There's no doubt that SQL Server 7.0 is faster and more scalable than its predecessor. Transamerica Corp.'s Flood Hazard Certification division conducts up to 15,000 requests a day against a database containing information on 100 million properties. "We're seeing [a performance gain of] a factor of two," says David Lish, VP of IS for the Transamerica division, in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., which was using SQL Server 6.5. "Our whole business revolves around turnaround time, and knowing you can throw any volume of requests at it and have it come back instantly is spectacular."

Lish also likes SQL Server 7.0's maintenance capabilities. "We run data-consistency checks every night, and it takes 13 hours," says Lish. If he used the full set of maintenance functions, including data index checking, the process would require 65 hours. But with SQL Server 7.0, the entire job takes only 10 hours.

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