Microsoft Extends SQL Server To The Web With Data ServicesMicrosoft Extends SQL Server To The Web With Data Services

Microsoft plans today to introduce an online data storage and query processing service, SQL Server Data Services, that aims to help businesses avoid much of the costs and complexity of developing and provisioning data-heavy apps and mashups.

"There is an opportunity in the data platform to take it to the Internet-scale services space," Microsoft technical fellow Dave Campbell, who took the lead in developing the new service over the last 18 months, said in an interview. "SQL Server Data Services extends SQL Server to the Web."

Amazon S3, meet the 800-pound gorilla.

Though Microsoft has made a gradual foray into cloud computing with hosted business CRM, e-mail, collaboration, and small-business tools, SQL Server Data Services is one of the company's first pushes to help companies offload heavy-duty storage and processing to the Web. A beta of the service will be made available today, with general availability due later this year.

"The greatest impact that services will have on business will come from the inevitable shift toward utility computing within the enterprise," Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie said today at Microsoft's MIX conference. "Over the course of 2008, I look forward to sharing how these platform-level investments will help our enterprise customers embrace utility computing in the cloud."

Campbell said the Internet represents an opportunity to revolutionize the way data is accessed and processed in much the same way that the standardization of network transport protocols helped push formerly tightly coupled databases and the applications that used them onto separate machines in the 1980s.

The long list of Microsoft's target customers for SQL Server Data Services includes small and medium-sized businesses looking to offload costs, developers looking to avoid infrastructure investments for data-intensive apps like mashups, and enterprises that might want easy archival and collaborative access to data sets.

Amazon may have broken innovative ground with S3 as the first to offer online data services, but SQL Server Data Services potentially lays the groundwork for Microsoft to bring more elements of SQL Server, one of its most successful server products and a business intelligence market leader, onto the Web. "Bringing the entire gamut of capabilities for data-driven applications to the Web will be a part of what differentiates SQL Server Data Services," Campbell said. Microsoft's move into this market could force competitors like Oracle to do so as well. Whereas Amazon S3 has attracted mostly startup companies, Microsoft is already actively seeking and gaining the interest of a few companies with lots of data, like newsreader maker NewsGator, which already stores "many terabytes" of data in SQL Server, including 7 million new articles every day. An internal user at Microsoft Research has already taken advantage of SQL Server Data Services to try to understand the differences and similarities in how social networking sites create their social graphs, and has stored more than 10 million pieces of social graph data on the service.

Still, Microsoft may face a challenge in getting businesses to sign on to its vision. Businesses won't put business critical data on the Web without some convincing. Latency may make for unacceptable wait times for high-performance apps, the potential of uncontrollable downtime represents a big risk, and customers will want to know that their data is secure.

Microsoft says the on-demand service will include business-class service-level agreements with SQL Server Data Services, and that companies and developers will be able to store "virtually any amount of data in the cloud." Companies also will be able to use Microsoft's Sync Framework to enable a form of offline access to SQL Server Data Services in an ability to sync offline data up with the cloud. For example, a developer might want to create a grocery-list manager that has online, offline, and mobile functionality for different uses at home and in the grocery store.

Though Microsoft has often been criticized for making its products work only with other Microsoft products, SQL Server Data Services doesn't require SQL Server or .Net applications. "I can walk up to it with standard types of tools," Campbell said. The service supports Rest and SOAP interfaces and will support the AtomPub protocol.

NewsGator CTO Greg Reinacker said in an interview that SQL Server Data Services could provide good archival storage for older data, though he might use it for more if it's successful as a data archival system. "It's expensive for us to maintain a lot of storage and a lot of CPU around our storage, and the more of that we can outsource is great for us," he said. "We have billions of articles we'd love to have indexed by anybody but me."

Reinacker said that one place where Microsoft might beat Amazon is in service-level agreements. Amazon's SLAs, he said, don't have enough teeth to provide Amazon with a significant revenue-based incentive to keep the service up and running, whereas he's convinced through some early discussions that Microsoft will do so.

Microsoft's wrapping the "entity data model" into SQL Server Data Services, meaning that developers will be able to easily create containers for a set of data and define data entities like "Customer" or "Order" that contain all the data types relevant to a customer or an order and can be altered at will, using technology Microsoft developed in a project code-named Astoria.

The entity data model should help developers create more flexible data sets and potentially more easily integrate disparate data. "The advantage of this is that developers can create logical data entities that don't already even exist or tie them together from different sources," Forrester Research analyst Noel Yuhanna said in an interview. "Today, if you want to integrate five different data sources, you need to know exactly all the details for the five different data sets. Instead of going through tedious ways of integrating, you can really tie into the data in real time."

That said, Microsoft says SQL Server Data Services isn't intended to replace traditional enterprise data integration products, but rather to complement or build on what they can do on the Web. "This enables the creation of data mashups on the Web and also offers the potential for traditional enterprise data integration technologies to map, integrate, and mashup on-premises data with data on the Web," Campbell said.