Ballmer Says MS Will Make its Mark on Data Warehousing               10.21.97
ACTION ITEMS                                                           D S *

InfoWorld reported that Microsoft has stated it is confident it can dominate data warehousing with Windows NT and the SQL Server database. In a tone reminiscent of an religious revivalist, Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, executive vice president of sales and support, said at the recent DCI Data Warehouse Conference in Phoenix, Arizona, that Microsoft is developing the product artillery to help drive SQL Server and NT to the top of the data warehousing market "In some sense, this is a coming-out party for us," he stated.

To help Microsoft become the data warehousing leader, the company is preparing a more scalable version of its SQL Server database, Version 7, and also is building online analytical processing (OLAP) software and APIs, meta-data-management solutions, and data mining tools, he said. Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet will increasingly be positioned as a warehouse interface, he said. PC processing continues to scale higher and higher to boost system scaling, he stressed.

"There's some time in the not-too-distant future when it will become clear that PC servers are the most powerful computing platform in the world," Ballmer said. "Five years from now, people won't be doing many data warehouses that aren't being done on PC devices. I assert that," Ballmer said. Recognizing that PC systems currently are not used in higher-level enterprise data warehouses, Ballmer said most warehouses today are smaller than 100GB.

"Now, these are not the mother of all data warehouses that we get to hear about," Ballmer said. SQL Server and NT have been labeled as not as scalable as Unix systems. Microsoft in its labs, however, currently has a set of NT systems scaling to 1 billion transactions per day, Ballmer said.

Microsoft's upcoming OLAP offering, code-named Plato, is due in mid-1998, along with SQL Server 7.0. In conjunction with Version 7.0, Microsoft will offer a new query processor, data transformation services, and other features to make the database more amenable to warehouses, Ballmer said.

Also in development is a meta data repository, for management of information about data in a warehouse, and data mining tools, although data mining products are not expected for perhaps two years.

For more information, see http://www.microsoft.com/