SSWUGtv – Are you Looking at a Career Shift?
With Stephen Wynkoop
When you have to change your path (whether within your company or completely changing careers)…what are the steps to a smooth transition? Laura Rose is on today’s show with some great tips!
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Where is SQL Server Going
SQL Server has had an unique position in the database engine market for many years. There were many competitors both open system and proprietary. Watcom SQL was very strong and once purchased by Sybase became SQL Anywhere. While not quite as full featured as SQL Server, the link to the product with PowerBuilder granted them market share.
Borland had a data engine which later was released as an open systems project. It still exists out there today. Oracle and DB2 were also available on Intel platforms.
But, on the smaller hardware Microsoft SQL Server is the dominant player for plain database engine power. Companies would purchase SQL Server instead of using open systems tools such as Posgres or MySQL simply because it was supported by a company and had support from the manufacturer and community as well.
No other product had the features available on SQL Server nor did they match the cost for capability. Look at the backups, reporting services, integration services, and so much more. In addition to other tools shipping with the engine, there were capabilities not matched by many of the other engines. At least, not on the scale provided by Microsoft.
Then, with the release of SQL Server 2008 R2 it seems the whole marketing of Microsoft has completely shifted to servicing the data mining community. Moreover, unless you are a truly small business, you will have no use for the standard edition of SQL Server.
With each release of SQL Server it seems more features are being moved to the Enterprise version or higher. I mentioned the resource governor in my editorial last Friday, and was reminded by Maurice that this feature is only for the elite.
Maurice
Great for the few who can afford it!
Sad to hear about it, if you build software for customers who don’t want to pay for Enterprise Edition, only Standard Edition.
So if you want to use it in your app, and have only an handful of customers who are willing to run the Enterprise Edition, you have to put some conditional code to do it.
Many SQL Authors don’t take into account this reality when talking about those great features.
There is no question regarding the direction being taken by Microsoft. The question is, how will the community of SMBs respond? Already I have been asked more than once why I am not using MySQL or Posgres instead of SQL server in different installations.
What is your opinion? I Microsoft going to lose a traditional SMB space? I believe they are willing to let it go completely and gain a bigger footprint in the glass house. It would also seem with their marketing that their approach to regain the SMB will be SQL Azure. Do you think it can stand in place of a self managed installation?
Share you thoughts and insights by writing btaylor@sswug.org. Get into the conversation.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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