What's that got to do with commercial databases? Not much, and that's the problem. While Gray is busy demonstrating SQL Server's scalability in scientific and lab environments (he says Microsoft Research has 15 terabytes on SQL Server), the marketing folks at Microsoft have a harder time coming up with business customers who are using their relational databases in such impressive, or at least sizable, ways.

"You don't see many instances of that in production," says Stephen Wong, CEO of Embarcadero Technologies Inc., an independent software vendor that sells database-administration tools for a variety of platforms, including SQL Server.

Hilton Hotels' Bean runs payroll applications on SQL Server and plans to move more-demanding financial apps to it next year.

After a careful assessment of competing products, Hilton Hotels moved its PeopleSoft Inc. payroll application from a Sybase database to SQL Server 2000 on an eight-CPU Dell Computer server last spring. The real-time transactional system supports information on 72,000 employees, making it one of the largest payroll applications running on SQL Server, says Damien Bean, VP of corporate systems with Hilton. "I wouldn't have done that three years ago--hell no," he says. "That was probably one of the most difficult technology decisions I've made in the last five years."

The move didn't come without a few days of angst. In the first week of operation, a glitch in a cache algorithm caused an unexpected spike in the amount of memory being used. "It was a disaster," Bean says. A team of SQL Server experts from Microsoft was on site within 18 hours and solved the problem, and since then, everything's gone smoothly. Bean plans to move what he says is an even more demanding application--finance--to SQL Server sometime next year. Working in Microsoft's favor, he says, is the high-volume, low-cost Windows-on-Intel model. Compared with other alternatives, he says, "it's remarkable the amount of computing power you can get for the same money."

Unproven scalability has been one of the knocks against the Windows-SQL Server combo from the beginning, one that chairman Bill Gates tried to put to rest in May 1997 when Microsoft hauled 45 Compaq servers into the Equitable building in New York to demonstrate Windows-based systems handling more than a terabyte of data and a billion transactions a day. Those thresholds, exceptional at the time, are now commonplace in business. But the underlying systems supporting such megaloads are still mostly mainframes or Unix-based servers.

	The more memory that database servers get, the better, Campbell says.

Now comes the big break that Microsoft's scalability gurus have been waiting for: a 64-bit operating system, .Net server, on large and fast Intel-based servers equipped with 32, or even twice that many, 64-bit Itanium microprocessors. "Database servers love memory," says David Campbell, a Microsoft product unit manager who's gotten code under his fingernails working on SQL Server's storage engine and lock manager. "The more you give them, the better they run."

A typical Windows server running SQL Server 2000 or its predecessor, SQL Server 7, would be configured with 3 Gbytes of RAM, or 64 Gbytes maximum if an administrator used special software called Address Windowing Extensions. The 64-bit chips can be configured with up to 1 terabyte of RAM, or more than 10 times the previous limit. The extra headroom will be useful for server consolidation and data warehousing, Microsoft says.