Well, there are many things I love about SQL Server. Otherwise, I wouldn’t spend my whole career around it, would I? I can talk about the powerful and easy-to-use client tools, or about the excellent high availability and disaster recovery features (aka “AlwaysOn”), or about the powerful ETL platform known as SSIS. And I can go on and on…

But I’m not here to talk about the variety of features within SQL Server (which are great by themselves). I want to talk about one thing that distinguishes SQL Server from all other data platforms, and maybe distinguishes Microsoft from all other DBMS vendors. And this is something that became much more meaningful with the release of SQL Server 2014. What am I talking about? I call it “One-Stop Data Platform”.

As opposed to other vendors in the market, Microsoft’s strategy is to put all its data platform components in one flagship product that we all know as “SQL Server”. And when I refer to “Data Platform”, I mean all the BI components as well. For the same price you pay for your license, you get everything in the box – relational engine, OLAP engine, ETL platform, reporting platform, high availability, performance, security, scalability, replication, and so on… When Microsoft develops a new feature, such as In-Memory OLTP, you get it as part of the product. You don’t need to purchase another license for an additional product. It’s all included. This is cool! When you upgrade your database to SQL Server 2014, you know you’ll get all the new features out of the box.

But this is only one aspect of the One-Stop Data Platform. The various features are not only included in one package, but they are also strongly integrated. And this is even more exciting and more unique. Continuing the In-Memory OLTP example, when you execute a query in SQL Server 2014, which performs a join between a disk-based table and a memory-optimized table, the optimizer knows how to analyze both types of tables and generate the best plan for this query, and the relational engine knows how to run such queries. This is not trivial at all. With most other vendors, you would have to work with two distinct products and split/merge the query yourself in order to leverage the benefits of both products. Take columnstore indexes, for example. The same optimizer and the same relational engine can now run a query that involves row-based indexes and columnstore indexes. No problem. You don’t have to change anything in your application. That’s really awesome!

But that’s not all… As a professional services company, we decided to focus on SQL Server and provide services around this product alone. People ask me why we don’t support big data and NoSQL platforms as well, such as MongoDB or Vertica. They tell me that we are staying out of the game. My answer is always the same. We’re riding on a winning horse called Microsoft. I can’t see Microsoft staying out of this game. It’s not gonna happen. And the way Microsoft enters this game is through the same One-Stop Data Platform.

We have already mentioned In-Memory OLTP as an in-memory engine. We also mentioned Columnstore Indexes as a columnar data structure. There is also support for XML, file streams and other non-relational data. SQL Server 2014 also introduced Delayed Durability, which allows you to make the log flushes asynchronous, and you can choose to enable it at the database level or the transaction level. This is the first time that Microsoft has included a feature within SQL Server that is not fully ACID compliant. And this is just the beginning. I have no doubt that the next release of SQL Server will be positioned much better to answer all the needs for big data and unstructured data in the market.

The case of Hadoop is different. Microsoft recognized the potential of Hadoop and decided to adopt this platform instead of developing its own solution. But Microsoft also makes a huge effort to integrate between the platforms as much as possible and to maintain the One-Stop Data Platform vision. I see it as a great opportunity, and this is why we are now supporting Hadoop as well alongside SQL Server and designing hybrid systems.

And what about the cloud? You can now run your SQL Server architecture on-premises or in Microsoft Azure, including all the high availability, disaster recovery and scalability features. You can deploy your databases anywhere and easily move them between different locations. And you can access your databases from the same set of client tools whether they are in your office or in the cloud. Once again, no need for different products or complex integration. How cool is that?

I mentioned the client tools earlier. Let me elaborate on that for a second… The same set of client tools (e.g., SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Server Data Tools) can be used to connect to any type of SQL Server database, anywhere (including the cloud), and manage/use all the features within SQL Server. So you can use the same client tools that you already know and are used to work with in order to perform tasks, such as creating in-memory tables, implementing a three-node availability group, deploy your database to Azure, develop an ETL process, design reports, and so much more…

To summarize all the advantages that make SQL Server a One-Stop Data Platform, I created a drawing to visualize the concept. OK, I’m not very good at drawing, but I think it’s not bad. Don’t you think?

Image courtesy of Darwin Bell

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