Microsoft rethinks SQL Server strategy

Microsoft is having a re-think about its SQL Server strategy and in particular about what it wants to do with SQL Data Services.

Part of the company’s Azure services platform, SQL Data Services, it appeared was going to produce a fairly straightforward, if not even perhaps cut-down databases services platform.

Users were not completely happy about this because if Azure was Microsoft’s cloud offering, what could it not have the functionality of a grown-up database? Reports then came out on Thursday at the MSDN Developer’s conference that Microsoft was going to do exactly that.

Microsoft officials at the conference, the reports said, had committed to come up with a fully hosted service and also said that Microsoft would deliver it before the end of the year.

There was something inevitable about all this and also something to be welcomed by users. The idea of mixing key applications like SQL Server and business intelligence and even others have been discussed for a while at Microsoft and now it is coming close.

Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer put a time on it this week telling the Wall Street journal that, “the next version of SQL Server will do some phenomenal things in business intelligence, and data warehousing. We’ll have a new high end version that we call Data Center some time over the next year or so" .