Microsoft 'eating its dog food' with SQL Server 7

It's a time-honored tradition at Microsoft: The company likes to use itsown software, even when it's in the early stages of development. This isknown as "eating your own dog food" and it helps Microsoft ensure that itsproducts are good enough to actually use. On that note, the company announced this week that it is now using SQL Server 7.0--which is due to bepublicly released in November--for all of its critical business systems,including its SAP R/3 ERP environment, Microsoft Sales, and Microsoft product support.

"We are demonstrating the enterprise capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 by running our own multibillion-dollar worldwide business on it," saidMicrosoft CIO John Connors. "The dramatic improvements to SQL Server 7.0 interms of reliability, operational environment, OLAP technology, and query performance and storage make us very excited as an IT organization."

Microsoft's SAP R/2 ERP environment is about 80 GB of data, reduced from140 GB when it ran on SQL Server 6.5. The Microsoft Sales database consistsof 150 GB of data; it is used concurrently by over 1,600 employees worldwide. Since moving to SQL Server 7.0, query performance has increased57%, while backup speed has increased 25%.

Microsoft is in the process of converting its public Web site to SQL Server7.0 as well. The Microsoft Web site--which is largely database-backed, isone of the busiest sites on the Web, receiving approximately 200 million hits a day.

"I expect the support requirements for any of our mission-critical transactions to drop between 20 and 40% with this company-wide rollout of SQL Server 7.0," said Connors. "[SQL Server 7.0 is] just another example ofwhat happens when Microsoft focuses on one area, puts the resources into it, hires very talented people and just plugs away every day.