1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:07,000 Hello everybody, here we are in lovely Las Vegas, Nevada at the Microsoft Mix 2009 conference 2 00:00:07,000 --> 00:00:11,000 in the Venetian, as you can tell from the lovely gold backup that we have. 3 00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:14,000 And we've got a guest with ourselves. Would you like to introduce yourself? 4 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:20,000 I would. Hi, I'm Patrick McElroy. I'm the Group Program Manager of the SQL Data Services team 5 00:00:20,000 --> 00:00:23,000 within the SQL Services team at Microsoft. 6 00:00:23,000 --> 00:00:26,000 We've been talking about Azure and cloud computing and things like that. 7 00:00:26,000 --> 00:00:33,000 And so, I think people know what SQL Server is, and that's that. Databases are covered as it were. 8 00:00:33,000 --> 00:00:35,000 Right, and the whole data platform. 9 00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:36,000 Exactly. 10 00:00:36,000 --> 00:00:38,000 Like just the relational database, but the BI. 11 00:00:38,000 --> 00:00:41,000 That's right. And oh, and you guys have Project Historia under. 12 00:00:41,000 --> 00:00:42,000 We do? 13 00:00:42,000 --> 00:00:45,000 No, it's in the same division, yeah. And you've got data services. 14 00:00:45,000 --> 00:00:46,000 Yeah. 15 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:47,000 You can't use the code data. 16 00:00:47,000 --> 00:00:48,000 Of course not. 17 00:00:48,000 --> 00:00:52,000 How is SQL Server moving into Azure into the cloud? 18 00:00:52,000 --> 00:00:54,000 Yeah, it's a great question. 19 00:00:54,000 --> 00:00:59,000 So, the SQL Data Services is the first of a series of staffs. 20 00:00:59,000 --> 00:01:02,000 But we'll take key parts of that SQL Data Platform. 21 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:08,000 And we'll extend it to both include what it does now, of course, desktop and server. 22 00:01:08,000 --> 00:01:10,000 And mobile will extend it into the cloud. 23 00:01:10,000 --> 00:01:14,000 Is there going to be sort of a relational, like typical database-like way of using it? 24 00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:16,000 Or is it going to be a REST sort of thing? 25 00:01:16,000 --> 00:01:17,000 Yeah. 26 00:01:17,000 --> 00:01:19,000 I mean, what are the interfaces playing out to be? 27 00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:27,000 And I ask that because as developers move to the cloud, there seems to be, typically it seems like you have to go through a technological shift. 28 00:01:27,000 --> 00:01:28,000 Well, it's true. 29 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:32,000 And there are clearly some differences in building services-based applications. 30 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:35,000 And that will impact on the applications that you build. 31 00:01:35,000 --> 00:01:40,000 But obviously there's value in keeping those differences to an absolute minimum. 32 00:01:40,000 --> 00:01:41,000 Right. 33 00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:48,000 And so one of the things we're doing, in fact, we announced last week, and we're reinforcing and giving some detail here at Mixon, 34 00:01:48,000 --> 00:01:56,000 is we are going to take SQL Data Services and we're actually going to expose the relational database capability that we have as a service, 35 00:01:56,000 --> 00:02:10,000 but using the TDS, the Tabular Data Stream Protocol, and the T-SQL query language, expressing to get a high degree of symmetry between the on-premise experience that you have with SQL Server and the rest of the SQL Data Platform, 36 00:02:10,000 --> 00:02:14,000 and now this cloud service that's built on the same technology foundation. 37 00:02:14,000 --> 00:02:24,000 So backing up a little bit to usage of things, while there's sort of legacy usage patterns that you want to definitely keep and enable, 38 00:02:24,000 --> 00:02:31,000 like, aside from, I mean, obviously if you're deploying an application in the cloud, you need to have a data store of some sort. 39 00:02:31,000 --> 00:02:32,000 That's right. 40 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:37,000 But are there things about being in Azure or the cloud that, like, give you something different that you didn't have previously? 41 00:02:37,000 --> 00:02:38,000 There certainly are. 42 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:47,000 So, you know, the core relational model and the relational query capabilities that you have as part of the platform are the part that's the symmetry. 43 00:02:47,000 --> 00:02:51,000 We think that there's a number of, we call them services goodnesses. 44 00:02:51,000 --> 00:02:52,000 Right. 45 00:02:52,000 --> 00:02:56,000 But good things that come from being able to deliver this as a service. 46 00:02:56,000 --> 00:03:00,000 Things like self-service provisioning, friction-free provisioning. 47 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:04,000 And will this prevent people having to wait, like, ten weeks for the DVA to create a column on the table? 48 00:03:04,000 --> 00:03:05,000 Exactly. 49 00:03:05,000 --> 00:03:12,000 And then four weeks before that to actually provision the machine to go put the database on and then wait for ten weeks to have the DVA create a column. 50 00:03:12,000 --> 00:03:13,000 Right, right. 51 00:03:13,000 --> 00:03:27,000 But, yeah, just so you can go through a very quick provisioning process and without having to stand up hardware or install or anything like that, you can get a database to build, you know, departmental and web workload apps on. 52 00:03:27,000 --> 00:03:40,000 And there are other that are a little bit more subtle, potentially, but the fact that we will redundantly store the data and we'll do all that behind the scenes for you means that even with that very simple provisioning experience, 53 00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:44,000 you'll get automatic fault tolerance and high availability out of the servers. 54 00:03:44,000 --> 00:03:54,000 Yeah, that's interesting because I remember one of the, well, one of the surprises that people have used cloud things for, like, whether it was EC2 or, you know, Amazon Cloud, is people backing up their database. 55 00:03:54,000 --> 00:03:54,000 Right. 56 00:03:54,000 --> 00:04:04,000 And just having, like, somewhere else to back their database up to you, which, you know, I always think when it comes to cloud computing, essentially storage is one of the low-hanging fruits, if you will, and everything that comes out of that. 57 00:04:04,000 --> 00:04:18,000 And the infrastructure that we built, again, based on that SQL Server technology foundation, but also the fault tolerant and the self-healing and the automatic fabric that we have around that SQL Server foundation. 58 00:04:18,000 --> 00:04:29,000 And the way the service will use that foundation will give customers that high availability and that fault tolerance simply by virtue of creating a database, so really without any rocket science at all. 59 00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:29,000 Right. 60 00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:33,000 Maybe it's something that is here to forward and only available through something like the rocket scientist. 61 00:04:33,000 --> 00:04:34,000 Exactly. 62 00:04:34,000 --> 00:04:39,000 Another key workload that we're targeting is the ISV workload. 63 00:04:39,000 --> 00:04:46,000 And as it turns out, it's particularly well-suited for an ISV that's building an application that will scale horizontally. 64 00:04:46,000 --> 00:04:47,000 Sure. 65 00:04:47,000 --> 00:04:53,000 So as with any kind of cloud platform or any kind of cloud technology, their scaling is one of the benefits of it. 66 00:04:53,000 --> 00:05:04,000 And with SDS, and particularly for, again, a horizontal scale.app, the ability to create those, think of them as partitions, but they're really new databases. 67 00:05:04,000 --> 00:05:05,000 Right. 68 00:05:05,000 --> 00:05:14,000 To scale your app, particularly if it makes sense to create a database per customer that you have for your app, is a very natural data model that you get. 69 00:05:14,000 --> 00:05:32,000 The interesting subtle point there is that once you do that, the fact that we're running on thousands of servers means that as you issue a query and you issue them against multiple databases, you now can get great benefit from that because your query now runs in parallel on dedicated processors. 70 00:05:32,000 --> 00:05:37,000 And you can process an amazing amount of data in parallel very, very quickly. 71 00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:42,000 And it's a very natural thing that you get because you've built your app. 72 00:05:42,000 --> 00:05:49,000 It's sort of bringing enterprise-grade sort of grid, you know, benefits down to just anyone who might want to use it. 73 00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:53,000 Yeah, and doing so in a very highly parallelized infrastructure. 74 00:05:53,000 --> 00:05:54,000 Right. 75 00:05:54,000 --> 00:06:04,000 So rather than scaling up the machine and buying a 64 processor with 12 terabytes of RAM, you know, you're just able to run this thing across a broad set of commodity blades. 76 00:06:04,000 --> 00:06:05,000 Right, right. 77 00:06:05,000 --> 00:06:07,000 But the throughput for queries can be just amazing. 78 00:06:07,000 --> 00:06:08,000 It's a little out of left field. 79 00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:16,000 But looking at the tooling that you've done for Azure, are there benefits that you're pulling back into on-premise SQL Server installs? 80 00:06:16,000 --> 00:06:17,000 Sure. 81 00:06:17,000 --> 00:06:24,000 The reason why we started with the SQL Server Technology Foundation is because it's a fantastic foundation. 82 00:06:24,000 --> 00:06:30,000 But the reason why we're thinking about this as part of extending the platform is because there's a lot of benefits kind of both ways. 83 00:06:30,000 --> 00:06:31,000 Right. 84 00:06:31,000 --> 00:06:32,000 The move to TDS and T-SQL has also allowed us to kind of open up to customers just the amazing ecosystem that you can use. 85 00:06:32,000 --> 00:06:37,000 You know, you've got a lot of resources, you've got a lot of resources, you've got a lot of resources. 86 00:06:37,000 --> 00:06:38,000 You've got a lot of resources. 87 00:06:38,000 --> 00:06:39,000 You've got a lot of resources. 88 00:06:39,000 --> 00:06:40,000 You've got a lot of resources. 89 00:06:40,000 --> 00:06:41,000 You've got a lot of resources. 90 00:06:41,000 --> 00:06:42,000 You've got a lot of resources. 91 00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:43,000 You've got a lot of resources. 92 00:06:43,000 --> 00:06:44,000 You've got a lot of resources. 93 00:06:44,000 --> 00:06:45,000 You've got a lot of resources. 94 00:06:45,000 --> 00:06:46,000 You've got a lot of resources. 95 00:06:46,000 --> 00:06:47,000 You've got a lot of resources. 96 00:06:47,000 --> 00:06:48,000 You've got a lot of resources. 97 00:06:48,000 --> 00:06:49,000 You've got a lot of resources. 98 00:06:49,000 --> 00:06:50,000 You've got a lot of resources. 99 00:06:50,000 --> 00:06:51,000 You've got a lot of resources. 100 00:06:51,000 --> 00:06:52,000 You've got a lot of resources. 101 00:06:52,000 --> 00:06:53,000 You've got a lot of resources. 102 00:06:53,000 --> 00:06:54,000 You've got a lot of resources. 103 00:06:54,000 --> 00:06:55,000 You've got a lot of resources. 104 00:06:55,000 --> 00:06:56,000 You've got a lot of resources. 105 00:06:56,000 --> 00:06:57,000 You've got a lot of resources. 106 00:06:57,000 --> 00:06:58,000 You've got a lot of resources. 107 00:06:58,000 --> 00:06:59,000 You've got a lot of resources. 108 00:07:07,000 --> 00:07:10,000 For example, a developer who's familiar with Visual Studio, 109 00:07:10,000 --> 00:07:13,000 familiar with the SQL Server tools that are in Visual Studio, 110 00:07:13,000 --> 00:07:16,000 can continue to use those as they build out applications 111 00:07:16,000 --> 00:07:18,000 that they'll deliver to as a service. 112 00:07:18,000 --> 00:07:19,000 Right. 113 00:07:19,000 --> 00:07:21,000 At a point where they're ready to deploy, 114 00:07:21,000 --> 00:07:23,000 rather than deploying to a SQL Server 115 00:07:23,000 --> 00:07:25,000 in your corporate LAN environment, 116 00:07:25,000 --> 00:07:29,000 you'll point that script to an endpoint in SDS, 117 00:07:29,000 --> 00:07:31,000 and you'll deploy in the same way, 118 00:07:31,000 --> 00:07:35,000 but you've spent all of your time in the rich tool set, 119 00:07:35,000 --> 00:07:39,000 and the rich ecosystem that you have in an on-premise environment, 120 00:07:39,000 --> 00:07:40,000 in a mobile development environment. 121 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:41,000 That makes sense. 122 00:07:41,000 --> 00:07:42,000 It's great, great synergy. 123 00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:44,000 Of course, it will be, particularly in our V1, 124 00:07:44,000 --> 00:07:47,000 it won't be 100% compatible, 125 00:07:47,000 --> 00:07:50,000 but we think for the vast majority of apps, 126 00:07:50,000 --> 00:07:52,000 80% of apps, 127 00:07:52,000 --> 00:07:57,000 and certainly even 90, 95% of the Carmel and Web Workload apps, 128 00:07:57,000 --> 00:08:00,000 that the compatibility that we'll be able to deliver in V1 129 00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:03,000 will mean they'll literally just point their deployment script 130 00:08:03,000 --> 00:08:04,000 at the endpoint. 131 00:08:04,000 --> 00:08:06,000 They'll deploy it and they're out and running. 132 00:08:06,000 --> 00:08:10,000 Another aspect that I'm interested in that you touched on briefly is, 133 00:08:10,000 --> 00:08:13,000 I guess you would call it the DBA aspects of dealing with that. 134 00:08:13,000 --> 00:08:17,000 And traditionally, like I was kind of cruelly joking about earlier, 135 00:08:17,000 --> 00:08:21,000 you know, the DBA is sort of a center of power and control in the enterprise. 136 00:08:21,000 --> 00:08:22,000 They are. 137 00:08:22,000 --> 00:08:25,000 So on the one hand, the question is, you know, for existing DBAs, 138 00:08:25,000 --> 00:08:30,000 how can they maintain that nice position they have as things move to the cloud? 139 00:08:30,000 --> 00:08:33,000 But then on the other hand, how does the role of the DBA sort of, I mean, 140 00:08:33,000 --> 00:08:39,000 does it get affected by just simply moving, you know, having SQL Server beyond the firewall? 141 00:08:39,000 --> 00:08:40,000 Well, I think it will be impacted. 142 00:08:40,000 --> 00:08:51,000 And I think that certainly the feedback that we've gotten from customers is that it will be a way for the DBAs and the IT staffs, corporate IT, 143 00:08:51,000 --> 00:08:55,000 to be able to provide a richer set of capabilities to back to their businesses. 144 00:08:55,000 --> 00:08:56,000 Right, right. 145 00:08:56,000 --> 00:09:01,000 And so it was really actually kind of interesting that we've been doing this now since the last next. 146 00:09:01,000 --> 00:09:04,000 So a year ago is when we first announced the service. 147 00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:08,000 And over time, we've been engaging, of course, with DBAs as well as data programmers. 148 00:09:08,000 --> 00:09:12,000 And the early feedback from DBAs was one of nervousness. 149 00:09:12,000 --> 00:09:13,000 Right. 150 00:09:13,000 --> 00:09:16,000 Like, what's happening to me and what am I going to do now in this world? 151 00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:19,000 And over time, the feedback from them and as they learn more about the system, 152 00:09:19,000 --> 00:09:24,000 this becomes another tool that they have to deliver capabilities to their businesses. 153 00:09:24,000 --> 00:09:25,000 Right. 154 00:09:25,000 --> 00:09:29,000 And in fact, again, just as we were talking about before with some of the query performance, 155 00:09:29,000 --> 00:09:36,000 you know, there are--Corp IT will actually find that there are some hidden benefits in here that may not be apparent. 156 00:09:36,000 --> 00:09:42,000 A great example is right now a lot of our customers will talk to us about, you know, 157 00:09:42,000 --> 00:09:47,000 that have this database sprawl effect, whether it be SQL Express or MySQL or something. 158 00:09:47,000 --> 00:09:50,000 It's databases will spring up like weeds in departments. 159 00:09:50,000 --> 00:09:52,000 Yeah, and that's when you mentioned many different versions. 160 00:09:52,000 --> 00:09:53,000 In many different versions. 161 00:09:53,000 --> 00:09:58,000 And particularly in, you know, the day and age in which we live around corporate compliance, 162 00:09:58,000 --> 00:10:05,000 there's some CX type, you know, CXO officer who has to sign off that all the policies have been applied to all the data, 163 00:10:05,000 --> 00:10:06,000 Right. 164 00:10:06,000 --> 00:10:09,000 which they sort of get nervous whenever they have to sign them. 165 00:10:09,000 --> 00:10:15,000 You fast forward and say, well, rather than building that under somebody's desk on a piece of, you know, used hardware, 166 00:10:15,000 --> 00:10:20,000 if you could just provision that in the cloud, not only do you get that self-provisioning you talked about, 167 00:10:20,000 --> 00:10:27,000 but now you get compliance, you get the ability to discover without getting in the way of somebody who needs to go build an app for their business. 168 00:10:27,000 --> 00:10:28,000 Right. 169 00:10:28,000 --> 00:10:38,000 Central IT can go discover that, can make sure policies are enforced appropriately on that, and really now can get the insight that they need in order to do the corporate compliance they have. 170 00:10:38,000 --> 00:10:45,000 That gets at another thing that I was curious about, especially when it comes to, you know, compliance and regulations and everything. 171 00:10:45,000 --> 00:10:48,000 And, you know, your data and therefore the databases are often at the heart of that. 172 00:10:48,000 --> 00:10:49,000 Right. 173 00:10:49,000 --> 00:10:50,000 Absolutely. 174 00:10:50,000 --> 00:10:57,000 And, of course, the idea of Azure or any cloud computing thing is that you'll have, you know, many different data centers spread out everywhere. 175 00:10:57,000 --> 00:11:06,000 What can we expect from, you know, the SQL server SDS area of Azure as far as I need this data to be in Germany or I need this to be in China? 176 00:11:06,000 --> 00:11:08,000 I mean, how does that sort of play out? 177 00:11:08,000 --> 00:11:18,000 Obviously Microsoft's investment in data centers around the world is a great investment that we'll live on and we'll live in those data centers and that'll be great for customers. 178 00:11:18,000 --> 00:11:31,000 The Windows Azure folks, in fact, at the conference are announcing an ability to name the geographic location that you'll handle deployment in and we expect to follow suit with that. 179 00:11:31,000 --> 00:11:42,000 So just as you can say, my computer is going to go in, you know, the Pacific Northwest somewhere in whatever data center that maps to, you'll be able to say the same thing about your database in SDS. 180 00:11:42,000 --> 00:11:48,000 And then you can, by doing that, control the fact that you want your compute near your data. 181 00:11:48,000 --> 00:11:56,000 Those two things will communicate over a pretty fat pipe in the data center and you'll get the performance you need, but you'll be able to kind of control where that might be. 182 00:11:56,000 --> 00:12:08,000 So while we have you here, it's a little bit off topic, but because I've closely followed the team and the project for a few years now, can you give us an update of, as I still like to affectionately call it, project a story? 183 00:12:08,000 --> 00:12:09,000 Like what's going on with that? 184 00:12:09,000 --> 00:12:10,000 Sure, sure. 185 00:12:10,000 --> 00:12:11,000 ADO.NET Data Services. 186 00:12:11,000 --> 00:12:12,000 Yes. 187 00:12:12,000 --> 00:12:13,000 Okay. 188 00:12:13,000 --> 00:12:25,000 So ADO.NET Data Services is the framework piece that will allow you to provide an entity model and an APP and REST-based interface on top of relational data. 189 00:12:25,000 --> 00:12:30,000 We're continuing obviously to invest in that and ship that as part of the .NET framework. 190 00:12:30,000 --> 00:12:34,000 And that turns out to very, very nicely with the relational model that we have. 191 00:12:34,000 --> 00:12:35,000 Exactly. 192 00:12:35,000 --> 00:12:51,000 Given that the way people currently consume that technology on-premises to do exactly that, is to take that framework, you know, do the development work that you need to fill out that framework, do the data mapping that you need, but then put that on top of a relational data model in a relational database. 193 00:12:51,000 --> 00:12:52,000 Sure. 194 00:12:52,000 --> 00:12:59,000 That will fit very, very naturally in the new SDS and in the new world without a story piece. 195 00:12:59,000 --> 00:13:04,000 The data services piece will be deployed into Azure Compute. 196 00:13:04,000 --> 00:13:08,000 Your database will live in SDS and it will work great in that environment as well. 197 00:13:08,000 --> 00:13:10,000 It will be a fantastic model. 198 00:13:10,000 --> 00:13:15,000 And, you know, another key thing that we're focused on is, of course, the breadth developer. 199 00:13:15,000 --> 00:13:16,000 Right. 200 00:13:16,000 --> 00:13:37,000 And it turns out, again, something sort of is counterintuitive, but, you know, supporting TDS and the T-SQL interface, you know, all of the client-type libraries that exist that live on that same foundation, ODBC, and then in turn, all of the open source client libraries, will work very nicely in that way. 201 00:13:37,000 --> 00:13:38,000 Right. 202 00:13:38,000 --> 00:13:46,000 But the ADO.NET Data Services is a great investment there as well about, you know, if you need to access your data through REST, Atom Pub, you're going to do it on an entity base. 203 00:13:46,000 --> 00:13:47,000 Right. 204 00:13:47,000 --> 00:13:48,000 It's a fantastic network. 205 00:13:48,000 --> 00:13:49,000 Well, great. 206 00:13:49,000 --> 00:13:50,000 Well, thanks for spending all this time to talk to us. 207 00:13:50,000 --> 00:13:51,000 Quite welcome. 208 00:13:51,000 --> 00:13:52,000 Thanks for the opportunity. 209 00:13:52,000 --> 00:13:52,000 Thanks.