Welcome to DH2i’s weekly contribution to the SQL Server Pro IdeaXchange. I’ll be sharing this responsibility with my co-founder and CTO, Thanh Ngo. Together we have over 20 years of experience with Microsoft SQL Server, ranging from software development and system migrations, to licensing cost analysis and system administration. We consider SQL Server to be one of the best database systems in the world—perfectly suited for solving tough problems.
Three things that have recently come to my attention characterize why I consider SQL Server to be such an excellent platform for building mission-critical business solutions:
1. SQL Server is a robust platform. Microsoft continues to make steady and significant investment in the SQL Server product family. The recent announcement and shipment of SQL Server 2014 represents the fifth major release of the product since SQL Server 2000. SQL Server is a significant component of Microsoft’s enterprise software strategy. That’s great news for businesses, but it’s definitely made life more challenging for DBAs and CIOs. Today, they’re dealing with the life-cycle costs of managing multiple versions of SQL Server that are supporting a range of mission-critical business systems.
2. SQL Server is a very successful product. In April 2014, Microsoft announced that SQL Server worldwide revenues passed the $5 billion mark “in terms of annual revenue and is growing like gangbusters.” Using an industry-standard ecosystem multiplier factor of 12, SQL Server now represents approximately $60 billion of economic activity. Customers are making significant investments in SQL Server. The health of the SQL Server ecosystem is creating more choice for customers to pick solutions to problems like security, big data and DevOps. But it’s also creating challenges around managing complexity.
3. SQL Server users are a passionate community. I saw one recent PASS statistic regarding the attendance of SQLSaturday events: As of mid-July, over 80 worldwide SQLSaturday events had taken place, attended by over 18,000 users, representing 113,522 hours of training. That’s just crazy that there are that many people who are willing to give up their Saturdays to learn and understand how they can be more effective deploying SQL Server in their companies. [Point of disclosure: I attended the Chicago event at the end of March. It was tremendous.]
So what we are going to cover? We will alternate between business-related and technical topics. I’ll be covering the business side, including topics like these:
- As expectations for datacenter capabilities grow and budgets shrink, I’ll dig into what Microsoft and its ecosystem partners are doing on the licensing front and how that will impact your business.
- We’ve been amazed at the statistics that put 70% of datacenter resources going to maintenance rather than addressing new business initiatives, so I’ll write about datacenter productivity and the issues that are keeping us from whittling away at those numbers.
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I watch trends closely, and will give you my take on current topics such as:
- migration
- SQL Server in the cloud
- disaster recovery challenges and approaches
- SQL Server virtualization
- clustering and high availability
- SQL Server 2014 and big data
- viability of containers in Windows environments
I’ll work to make sense out of these topics so you can be more effective with regard to SQL Server. If there are specific topics you’d like to see addressed, I hope you’ll let me know!
Really looking forward to the whole process. See you next week.
