Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Places in the Gartner Leaders Quadrant

Microsoft announced that Gartner research placed Microsoft SQL Server 2008 in the Leaders Quadrant in their Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems, 2008 (Gartner, Inc., December 23, 2008). Others leading data management and business intelligence platforms providing enterprise-class data warehousing solutions joining Microsoft in the Leaders Quadrant include Teradata, Oracle, IBM, and Netezza.

So what's a magic quadrant? According to Gartner, "Quadrants . . . offer visual snapshots of a market's direction, maturity and participants. Understanding our research methodology will help you use these models effectively when choosing a product or service, or managing a vendor relationship." The Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems depicts Gartner's analysis of how data warehouse DBMS software-only vendors measure against specific criteria within the marketplace, according to the Microsoft press release.

The Gartner report says that “The data warehouse DBMS market has evolved from a traditional information store supporting business intelligence (BI) users and tools into an analytics infrastructure repository for the enterprise. And organizations are adding additional workload from online transaction processing (OLTP) applications and increasing the frequency of data loading to intraday, approaching continuous loading.”

To learn more about the study and the trends, read the Gartner report at "Magic Quadrant for Data Warehouse Database Management Systems."

The Microsoft press release explains that the post-RTM SQL Server 2008 project called “Madison,” which integrates DATAllegro’s massively parallel processing (MPP) technologies, extends SQL Server’s data platform to support the largest business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing deployments.

For more commentary from Microsoft, see the MSDN blog Architects Rule!

For more on Project Madison, see Microsoft Unveils New Technologies at BI Conference.