This session focused on the ‘ease of use’ release theme. The presenter stated that people are buying 2 to 300 copies of SQL Server at a time.
Microsoft’s goal is to move out of the workgroup
niche and have SQL Server on the desktop and in large organizations.
For the desktop, they want to have SQL Server
self-configuring, with no DBA requirement. For workgroups, they want it to be
self-managing. For large organizations, they want the lowest total cost of
ownership, to support multi-server operations and to provide interoperability.
There will be 20 Wizards in Beta3, 5-10 more by ship date.
For the DBA, they are providing a data base designer This
is basically the Visual Database Tools diagrammer. It is not a full-blown data
modeling tool like ERWin or System Architect. There was a demo of the database
diagrammer. It will be possible to print the database diagrams by release; right
now it isn’t. SQL Trace has been renamed SQL Profiler and is much
enhanced. The Index Tuning Wizard is almost frightening, but since it
doesn’t handle concurrency issues I don’t think I’ll be out of
work yet! A functioning (unlike previous efforts) graphical showplan is
available and it is really good. Shows the costing info and decision process
clause by clause.
For data warehousing, they are providing the Data
Transformation Services, the Microsoft Repository, which will be part of SQL
Server, and Microsoft English Query. (More on both of these later.)
Distributed Management Framework and DMO
For ISV’s and MIS Applications, they are going to
make it easy to embed and deploy SQL Server. SQL-DMO provides a COM
administrative interface. There is something called the SQL-namespace which I
don’t completely understand. It is composed of administration objects and
the administration UI. You are supposed to be able to put specific dialogues or
wizards into any tool that supports SQL Server. I don’t know how to do
his yet, but it would clearly solve some of the problems of presenting some but
not all functions to a power user who isn’t a full-fledged administrator.
The new Distributed Management Framework looks like
this:
You will be able to use VB to launch a wizard, as well.
The events layer is used by the SQL Profiler, which allows it to see
"inside", stored procedures (the current SQL Trace only shows you the
exec statement for the procedure). Things like table scans and locks will also
be events. I assume this means we might be able to set up alerts for a table
scan of a big table but I don’t know for sure.
