SQL Server Roadmap

Beyond SQL Server 2008 R2, Microsoft plans a major release of the SQL Server software in 2011 as well as continued updates to SQL Azure. Future priorities will probably be influenced by the company’s cloud services and applications. (See the illustration “SQL Server and SQL Azure Roadmap“.)

Major Release Likely in 2011

For the SQL Server on-premises software, two important releases are coming in the next two years.

Parallel Data Warehouse (formerly code-named Project Madison) is a data warehouse appliance platform to be sold by hardware partners such as Bull, Dell, EMC, HP, and IBM, whose offerings will begin to appear before the end of 2010. Formally called SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse, the platform is actually based on SQL Server 2008 (not 2008 R2) as well as technology acquired with Datallegro in July 2008. Data warehouses are special-purpose databases designed and organized to store large volumes of historical data to aid decision making in organizations. The Parallel Data Warehouse platform is intended to support SQL Server data warehouses with hundreds of terabytes of data residing on large numbers of low-cost servers.