The September issue of the SQL Server Standard magazine is being mailed out as you read this and it is now available as a PDF download for those subscribers in their Virtual Briefcase. This month we look at SQL Server and the various ways that you can push the limits with high availability and scalability. The editorial below is available for those that want to see what's inside. The magazine should be available shortly on the PASS site as well as the MCP Special Offers page.

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Extreme SQL Server

I think SQL Server is the best database platform on which to develop. Not that I have great experience with the other major platforms, but in reading about them, watching the news, seeing the pros and cons, it just seems to me that SQL Server is the best choice and so I’ve based, and continued to base, my career on it.

One area that SQL Server seems to take most of its knocks is the extreme environments that are in some companies. Situations where it must scale to very high levels, where it must be extremely available, or where someone is pushing the absolute limits of what their systems can achieve. These are the places that I see Oracle and DB/2 bragging about their ability to scale, or MYSQL touting it’s low cost and ability to grow across dozens of machines. I don’t doubt that the creators of these systems have made their technologies work well, but they likely have very talented people in place. That’s something that most of us just don’t have. We have good people, but they’re not the best and most of us need a technology that works in a variety of situations at a good cost point. SQL Server is that technology.

However, SQL Server has made great strides in every edition, and 2005 is no exception, to compete better and better in extreme places. In this issue of the magazine, we’ve taken a look at a few of those areas. Database Mirroring and Snapshots as well as clustering are technologies that help SQL Server to perform extremely well in high availability environments. We’ve also added a look at how the DTC service needs to be setup in a Windows 2003 cluster, a challenge if you’ve been trying to get it to work.

Reporting Services, arguable the most important change to SQL Server since the 2000 release, goes head to head with Crystal Reports, the longtime champion of reporting packages. Two highly experienced BI consultants compare these two products and the results are very interesting.

In my decade plus of working with SQL Server, I’ve seen it grow and mature. There have been times I’ve tipped my hat to another product and said it was a better choice. And there have been times I’ve considered moving my career to another platform to take advantage of its popularity. However with the release of SQL Server 2000, I’ve felt that it could handle pretty much any situation if it was well designed. Maybe not the most extreme situations, but it would shine in 90-plus some percent of the world. So the next time someone says SQL Server isn’t up to the task, tell them to do a little more research and see why companies like NASDAQ, the World Bank, and others have trusted their multi-terabyte databases, that are highly available, to SQL Server.

Steve Jones