Launch sequence

At the launch event, Microsoft also showcased its Visual Studio 2005 development tool and announced its forthcoming data integration software, BizTalk Server 2006. According to Charbel Fakhoury, general manager for Microsoft Gulf, the launch delivers a set of new platform capabilities that offer greater integration between the server infrastructure and development tools. This, Microsoft believes, will give users software that can provide a tangible impact on business results.

“Microsoft customers’ demands are changing and there is an opportunity for us to deliver a platform that will better enable people to add more value, gain greater insight and play an even bigger role in the success of their organisations,” Fakhoury says.

The new SQL Server database platform provides enterprise-class data management with integrated business intelligence (BI) tools. The database engine has been improved since the previous 2000 edition to provide better security, and more reliable storage for both relational and structured data, enabling users to build and manage highly available data applications for use in businesses.

“We are offering a range of services that expand on these products and will enable our customers to connect the information across their business so their people can gain deeper insights, and obtain faster results,” Fakhoury continues. ||**|||~|PHOTO-2—adam-BODY.jpg|~||~|Additionally, the SQL Server solution now combines analysis, reporting, integration, and notification capabilities to enable businesses to build and deploy cost-effective BI solutions. According to Adam Carroll, SQL Server product manager for Microsoft EMEA, these solutions will help drive data into every corner of the business through scorecards, dashboards, web services, and mobile devices.

“Through a collaborative development process with customers and partners, we have developed platforms that will provide developers and IT professionals with a dependable application platform,” Carroll states. “This will allow developers, database administrators, information workers and decision makers to gain easy access to information from across the business and gain more value from their data.”

Carroll also highlights the level of integration between the Visual Studio Team System, SQL Server 2005 and BizTalk Server 2006 as a unique selling point of the new releases. Microsoft had acknowledged in the past that the work carried out to improve the integration of the products had been one of the reasons SQL Server’s release had been delayed, but Carroll is confident that customers will find the results were worth the wait.

“We weren’t going to release the product until we were happy with all aspects of its design and performance,” he says. “Now, the close integration of Visual Studio and SQL Server increases the productivity of programmers by allowing them to write database applications in whichever code they are most comfortable with — C#, Visual Basic or J++. The product is also much more scalable, secure, efficient to deploy, and is capable of running all mission-critical enterprise jobs.”

Microsoft officials are hoping that the enterprise edition of SQL Server 2005 can detract from the dominance of Oracle’s 10g database and IBM’s DB2, and the vendor proudly cites a host of Fortune 500 corporations and other multinationals that have already adopted the software for their business-critical applications. Among the list of well-known names is the NASDAQ stock market, which replaced its aging Tandem mainframes used to disseminate market trade data with a SQL Server system.

The stock market deployed the solution on two four-node Dell PowerEdge 6850 clusters to support its market data dissemination system (MDDS). Every trade that is processed in the NASDAQ marketplace goes through the MDDS system, with SQL Server 2005 handling some 5,000 transactions per second while the market is open.

The system simultaneously handles 100,000 queries a day, using SQL Server 2005 to support real-time queries against the data without compromising the speed of the database, and can scale up to 8 million new rows of data per day. “SQL Server 2005 Snapshot Isolation gives us the ability to support real-time queries without slowing database performance,” enthuses Ray Edwards, director of market information systems at NASDAQ.

On a regional level too, large enterprises are already moving to deploy the new solution. For example, Garanti Bank, one of the largest private banks in Turkey, was among the first to upgrade to SQL Server 2005.

To reduce processing loads on its mainframe Garanti, which has international operations and assets of US$21.7 billion, had steadily improved its internal applications and designed new applications to run on its existing SQL Server 2000 database software. Bank management were keen to take advantage of a number of new features in the 2005 edition in order to eliminate scheduled offline time for database re-indexing and gain near real-time reporting.

The move to SQL Server 2005, running on Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, now provides Garanti with a more robust database foundation with greater availability and the ability to move applications off the mainframe. “We found that transaction processing performance with SQL Server 2005 was nearly three times faster compared to SQL Server 2000,” adds Umut Nazlica, a specialist in system management at the bank’s internal IT service provider, Garanti Technology.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, the National Bank of Kuwait and the Omani mobile operator Nawras have also recently announced projects to deploy the latest release of the SQL Server.

Carroll says he expects more announcements to follow over the coming months, driven by growing understanding among the regions CIOs of the importance of easy access to business-critical information.

“BI data is like gold dust. Customers in the Middle East are now beginning to realise the benefits of having this kind of extensive insight into their operations and are looking for solutions that can help deliver it.”||**||