The Future of SQL Server: Ted Kummert Looks Ahead

In that brief moment after the latest version of SQL Server has shipped and before the next public release cycle begins, SQL Server pros have a perfect opportunity to assess what they want out of the current release and what they’re looking for in the future. As always, SQL Server Magazine is here to help. SQL Server Magazine’s Michael Otey, senior technical director, and Sheila Molnar, executive editor, joined Ted Kummert, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Business Platform Division, for an exclusive interview about SQL Server 2008 R2 and the future of Microsoft’s data platform. Ted is responsible for setting the strategy for SQL Server, cloud services, data programmability, and modeling technologies. We spoke with him in mid-summer, before the fall product announcements. For an update, watch for the web-exclusive sidebar “Ted Kummert Comments on SQL Server Product Announcements."

SQL Server Magazine: What do you see as Microsoft’s competitive edge in the relational database market?

Kummert: We talk about building SQL Server in terms of the Information Platform Vision, which encircles how we think about what we build. We talk about a comprehensive set of capabilities that forms the foundation of the mission-critical platform. We talk about each of the communities we serve in terms of the IT pros, the developers, and every end user who wants business insights. I look at our overall approach: We’re delivering the SQL Server platform to the desktop, in the data center, in the cloud. We have a very intensive and broad scope. We can start with a departmental workload and scale mission-critical workloads to the highest levels of scale. And we bring all of those capabilities together in one product. We think this kind of comprehensive and complete approach is unique in the market.

Now I’ll talk about our philosophy in terms of how we bring it to market. We feel very good about our hardware ecosystem and our partners. They’re a big part of the overall equation being able to bring these solutions to market built on industry-standard server platforms with a lot of choice for customers. And, given how we approach and price our product and how we work with our hardware ecosystem, we think it’s a great value for our customers in terms of solution costs and total cost of ownership (TCO). And certainly in today’s economy TCO really does matter to our customers.

SQL Server Magazine: How critical is business intelligence (BI) to the future of SQL Server?

 Kummert: For our customers, BI continues to be a high priority in terms of investment. The current pressures on our customers to do more with less and show more business value are raising the relative priority of investments in BI solutions. BI is fundamentally about end users who need to get questions answered. Out there in the world of data is the answer to the question that’s going to help them move forward and help the business move more efficiently. BI is about empowering end users with tools and capabilities. SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 managed self-service BI are revolutionary in terms of empowering end users to solve problems on their own. IT still gets to do the strategic stuff. We think that’s going to be a great thing for our customers.

SQL Server Magazine: Do you see SQL Server gaining market share in 2011 against other high-end relational database platforms?

Kummert: Yes we do. It’s gratifying to see the successes our customers are having using our platform for those mission-critical business applications. There are a couple of good stories. I think of PREMIER Bankcard, one of the largest credit card providers in the United States. They’ve been on a journey where BI has become a mission-critical part of their business decision making. And at the heart of that infrastructure is a very large data warehouse—a 17TB data warehouse built on SQL Server 2008. And that upgrade to SQL Server 2008 gives them the confidence that it’s going to scale to 30TB capacity in the future. I think about First American Title—they run their entire title and escrow processing on an application built on SQL Server. It’s a multi-terabyte storage application. They upgraded to SQL Server 2008, and they take advantage of backup and data compression and features for managing the environment that make the environment more efficient in terms of the data collector and the management views. These things help manage and scale the solution effectively and efficiently. It’s great to see these successes—our view is there’s nothing out there that our product can’t scale to.

 
SQL Server Magazine: Are these the kind of customers that are the driving forces behind the Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) Edition?

Kummert: Yes, this is certainly the PDW Edition. That release is imminent. We’ll be releasing it later in this calendar year. This is where we’ll add scale-out data warehousing to the SQL Server product family. If you look at SQL Server and data warehousing today, we’re out there running at the tens of terabytes. But a lot of our larger customers have data warehouses that are larger than that. The addition of scale-out data warehousing gives us a solution that will scale to those data warehouses. So we’ll take SQL Server to the hundreds of terabytes. And we can be a one-stop shop for all of our customers’ data warehousing needs—from that large Single Version of the Truth data warehouse to the surrounding data warehouses in the data marts to the BI tools. You’ve now got one platform to manage and one company to deal with.

 
SQL Server Magazine: How do you see the data market shifting in the next five years?

Kummert: BI is a high priority: A lot of our customers have multiple solutions in their environment. This is an issue in terms of enabling collaboration, and we’re having a lot of conversations around standardizing BI tools. We’ll continue investments in managed self-service BI. The second area is the cloud. Cloud computing can enable our customers to focus more on the needs of their business because they don’t have to spend time and effort managing the infrastructure part of the equation. If they’re buying Azure from us, we’re solving that part of the problem for them. They can think more about their applications, their data, and how to solve their business problems. Cloud computing really says, “IT becomes delivered more and more like a service.” That’s going to be transformational for our customers in the future. Microsoft’s been doing cloud computing for quite some time. We’ve been a provider of Internet-scale services. If you look at what we’ve been doing in MSN, in Live, and in search—we have experience that we bring to bear in terms of how we build Azure.

SQL Server Magazine: How do you see the move to the cloud affecting the readers of SQL Server Magazine—DBAs, developers, and BI professionals? Do you see their roles shifting in the future?

Kummert: We think it’s part of our responsibility to our community to shift their roles, if you will. They can focus on solutions that add business value because we’ve taken some of the routine of “just making it work” out of their hands. We feel a great deal of responsibility for making the community of IT professionals, database professionals, BI practitioners, and developers successful. They’re out there with our product every day getting problems for the business solved. We want to enable them to go up the value chain and focus more on the tasks and projects that add strategic value to the business. And cloud computing is a trend that is going to enable them to move more in that direction.

SQL Server Magazine: Do you think that cloud computing is easier to adopt in a small organization or a larger one?

Kummert: This is something that’s available for all businesses. From the small business that really doesn’t want to spend time thinking about and managing an infrastructure and just wants to get a business problem solved, to the very large enterprise, where the type of investments they make are strategic to how their business process runs. The cloud is real, whether it’s a small business or the largest enterprise.

SQL Server Magazine: What are Microsoft’s plans for extending BI to the cloud?

Kummert: We want the BI practitioner or the database professional to understand that they’re going to be able to use their knowledge, skills, and assets as they use SQL Azure. We’re working forward on a principle of consistency that applies to our programming model and tools. For instance, with SQL Azure, which just became commercially available earlier this year, we currently have a subset of capabilities in terms of the overall programming model. Developers have been able to take an existing app and bring it very easily into SQL Azure. We’ve gotten a lot of positive reception to SQL Server Management Studio being able to work against a SQL Azure environment. Azure is another tier in our platform. It’s not a new and distinct tier. It’s a part of the end-to-end information platform. So we’ve got a set of capabilities now that orient around the application scenarios, but we do intend to offer broader services in the SQL Server platform as part of SQL Azure--that includes reporting and analytics. So that’s definitely on our roadmap. We’re not announcing specifics today. All I’ll say to our readers is “Stay tuned!”

SQL Server Magazine: You mentioned SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS). Can SSMS in SQL Server 2008 R2 manage SQL Azure?

Kummert: Yes. We’ve enabled that capability in SQL Server Management Studio to manage on-premises SQL servers as well as to be able to connect and manage the SQL Server Azure database environment.

SQL Server Magazine: What’s the feedback you’ve gotten so far on SQL Server 2008 R2? What’s the adoption rate?

Kummert: We’ve seen very strong adoption so far. In just a couple of months since we’ve released the product we have close to 700,000 downloads, which is the largest we’ve ever seen for a new release of SQL Server. We’ve gotten a lot of positive reception on the capabilities that we’ve delivered. A big part of that release is what we delivered in managed self-service BI. We have customers in production with a lot of interesting applications on that infrastructure, and a lot of great feedback on the manageability features—multi-instance management and application management. We have interesting conversations going on around the new workloads—Master Data Services and StreamInsight. We’re building on the momentum and adoption we’ve seen for SQL Server 2008.

SQL Server Magazine: What advice can you offer readers who don’t keep up with the latest SQL Server releases?

Kummert: We’ve worked hard on a couple of things. One is to make sure that the upgrade process is easy and seamless. The other is about features that are transparent to applications. If you upgrade, these are things that, without modifying your application, you’re just going to be able to take advantage of. In SQL Server 2008 there’s some emblematic features—data compression, transparent data encryption. Without changing your application you can get the benefits of the encrypted store and the backup and compression. You can go through the upgrade and then take advantage of manageability capabilities to gain their benefit. So we’re making that upgrade process simple and delivering new value that you can get without investing in new applications or changing your existing applications.

SQL Server Magazine: Our DBA readers are looking forward to the next SQL Server release as a strong relational database release. What are some of the areas that Microsoft is intending to focus on?

Kummert: We continue to anchor what we do in SQL Server around the Information Platform Vision \[empowered IT, pervasive insight, dynamic development, and mission-critical platform—for more information, see www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/overview.aspx\]. So we think about those four pillars, and we think first and foremost about SQL Server as the platform for mission-critical applications. That’s the foundation. We’ve had a lot of investment in SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 R2 along those lines, and I would expect to see us continue to invest there. The second area is about the features for our IT pros and database professionals: SQL Server’s hallmark has been providing the platform with the lowest TCO and that’s a continuing commitment. We want to enable developers to build richer solutions, and we’re going to continue to invest along those lines. And the last part we talk about is delivering what we call “pervasive insight.” It’s about empowering every end user with the tools to get their questions answered. We’ve invested a lot in the last release on managed self-service BI, which has to do with the people who aren’t using the formal BI solutions today. We don’t want anybody to be confused. We’re quite committed to enhancing our capabilities in the platform for those formal, corporate BI solutions. And I would expect to see us continue to invest in those areas as well. We’re pretty excited about what we’ve got coming. Stay tuned! We have a lot of exciting things to talk about in the future.

SQL Server Magazine: SQL Server PowerPivot for Excel was aimed at the business power user of Excel. Our SQL Server authors’ interest in using this tool themselves has picked up over the past few months. Does Microsoft want to make PowerPivot something that SQL Server pros will use?

Kummert: The managed self-service BI features were designed for all end users. And “all end users” doesn’t just include business analysts or information workers. This includes IT professionals and developers. All of them can benefit from the capabilities we’ve delivered in managed self-service BI. There are a lot of great stories that start with, “Hey we used to have this ad hoc compliance process that happened every month in a manual way. We get three people in a room to bring some data together and put the solution together in Excel to answer some question.” PowerPivot enables them to build a formal solution, and now it’s just there. They’ve deployed it in the environment, the data is refreshed automatically, and now they don’t have to invest in that manual ad hoc process every month. I’d say to a lot of our professionals, “Hey, you’ve got some things like that. Look at those places where you’re using Excel to analyze data. Think about those places as opportunities to put PowerPivot into play to enable you to formalize some things you’ve been doing ad hoc.” This is a tool our professionals can and should be using today. We bring some of the capabilities in terms of PowerPivot into our tools for BI professional users, and we continue to bring some of the features that right now are supported only in our formal BI platform down into PowerPivot. We do see unification of these environments in the future.

SQL Server Magazine: One of the surprising things in SQL Server 2008 R2 is that Microsoft still offers 32-bit versions of SQL Server. It seems to be the only server product left that’s 32-bit. Do you think that’s going to change for the next release?

Kummert: SQL Server 2008 R2 does support both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, and the most important thing for us is to provide support for the platforms where our customers are. And as we look forward to our future plans that’s how we’re going to make those decisions.

SQL Server Magazine: We’ve heard a lot of talk from Microsoft about the “consumerization of IT,” with professionals bringing their technology from home into the workplace. Do you see this phrase applying to SQL Server professionals?

Kummert: A great example of the consumerization of IT would be search. We’ve seen an evolution in search where, at first, people could search and find information on the public Internet. Now we’re enabling that search experience in structured data and BI applications. And think about social media—we brought the managed self-service BI scenario into SharePoint so we can enable sharing and collaboration. You want to be able to find the others, build on the work of others, and SharePoint’s the place for you to do that. That also allows us to unlock other features of SharePoint; social media features: “l like this”; “I want to see things that other users like.” We inherit those types of things.

SQL Server Magazine: Can you talk about Microsoft’s plans for SQL Server regarding unstructured data?

Kummert: A big part of our investment in our information platform and SQL Server is to enable it to be able to process all the types and shapes of data you want to be able to use and consume in your business processes and applications. In SQL Server 2008 we added a new set of spatial data types. In terms of unstructured data we added the filestream column type, and we’ve seen a lot of positive reception of customers now being able to use that column type and be able to deal with unstructured data within that same programming model. We’re going to continue to invest in those areas of the platform going forward.

SQL Server Magazine: What do you see as the future of SQL Server and virtualization? In the past a lot of DBAs were hesitant to virtualize SQL Server; do you think that’s changing?

Kummert: We’re having this conversation with our customers around application virtualization to their database environment. And it comes primarily from server consolidation, where there are just so many benefits for our customers in terms of reducing footprint that provides so many downstream benefits in terms of manageability and costs of the solution in the environment. We’ve been working to make that a great solution on the Microsoft platform—from the hypervisor with Hyper-V to the management tools with System Center and Virtual Tool Machine Manager, and then SQL Server.

SQL Server Magazine: Does Microsoft use virtualized SQL Server for anything?

Kummert: Yes we do. In Microsoft’s Information Technology Group we are applying those technologies to virtualize those environments and seeing great benefits from that.

SQL Server Magazine: We always like to know how Microsoft uses its technologies.

Kummert: We get a lot of benefit out of Microsoft IT as well as our partnership with the other Internet properties inside the company. There are thousands of SQL Server instances within the Live infrastructure. We gain a great deal of learning from that experience and we partner very deeply with Microsoft IT as we head to the release of a product. We don’t release the product until we get applications in production in our own environment first. That’s a very important part of what we do to get the product ready for our customers before we release it.

SQL Server Magazine: Are there any ways in which SQL Server is being used that you didn’t expect?

Kummert: With SQL Azure we’ve seen some very cool stuff. I look at TicketDirect—they’re an event management company in Australia, and they provide ticketing services. They had an existing application running on premises, and they extended it to a Software Plus Services model. And now they’ve added the capabilities to use SQL and Windows Azure. And what do they get? They get the ability to flex. Say there’s a really popular event coming—now they can flex into the additional capacity that they need for that event. They enabled a new scenario and were able to get some of the benefits of the cloud model and this “pay as you go” thing almost immediately. I think of Esri, a pioneer of geographic information systems (GIS). They built a solution called MapIt that’s about taking some of the capabilities, exploring the geospatial information, and making it more broadly available. They brought MapIt to this platform pretty easily. We just introduced spatial data types in SQL Azure, and it’s exciting to see how easily Esri was able to bring that solution over to Azure. I feel like I’ve got this privileged seat where I get to see all these amazing things that our customers are able to do. It’s really what it’s all about for us.

SQL Server Magazine: The geospatial data types really enable a whole new kind of application. Our readers are pretty excited about it.

Kummert: The ability to analyze data within a spatial domain just unlocks insight. It can be as simple as being able to download visualized data within a map. We just released a mapping control as part of SQL Server 2008 R2 Reporting Services. Think of how much more compelling it is to be able to look at data within that spatial domain rather than in a list of addresses.

SQL Server Magazine: Is there anything you want to say directly to our readers—they are a dedicated and loyal lot!

Kummert: I just want to reiterate: The community is critical to what we do. What they build around our platform—that’s a critical part of how we’re successful. If we don’t make the community successful, we’re not going to be successful. We’re not confused about this. There are always changes coming. There are things we invest in and build; there are new capabilities; there’s new things coming like cloud computing. There’s so much opportunity to become more strategic in what you do and how you do it. Our commitment is to this community and to make sure they’re successful now and to the future. And we thank them for the partnership we’ve had over the years, and we look forward to many years to come.