I am on a quest for a idera..err..idea of new feature. Could it be just beyond the red gate?

The 3rd party software vendors for SQL Server are in deep shit going to have to step it up in the coming years. A lot of the new features in SQL Server 2008 were previously available commercially. Backup compression, historic reports\data collections, multiserver queries and intellisense  directly compete with 3rd party products. It can be argued that the 3rd party products are fuller featured but free(enterprise edition required for some) and simple to use goes along way. You can set backups to be compressed by default server wide so you don't even have to change your scripts. The "out of box" historic reports are nice but they are not as nice as the 3rd party offerings. This is true. Give it a little time though and I suspect that there will be plenty of reports posted up on CodePlex or in sp1.

However, the manageability enhancements are also equally as big if not bigger. Even if they do not directly compete with a 3rd party product, they have the potential to over shadow some. Click here for this tiny example. There are auditing packages that are nice but can they really complete with policy based management. All of theGUI enhancements will make 3rd party query editors and management tools almost undesirable at least for now.

So is this bad. Heck, no. This is capitalism which is how products(and then markets) get better. Now the vendors have to step it up, innovate, cut the fat or die. They will come out with cool new stuff. One is already claiming the "superhero" title. /on a market level, this will push into Oracle and visa versa. It is not like Microsoft is not innovating. I bet Oracle is working hard on filtered indexes as we speak. That's just how it works.

Imagine a world where features could be patented.

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When Microsoft first announced the compressed backup feature, I thought exactly the same thing. But if you drill even just a little bit deeper, the more mature third party apps don't have anything to worry about. Take the backup reporting, for example - LiteSpeed's centralized backup reports work across all of your SQL Servers (2000/2005/2008), regardless of whether you're using the compression or not. I'm surprised MS still doesn't offer a central management console for things like this, but the fact is they don't, and the partners do.

Granted, a lot of shops just need the basic backup compression, and they'll be ecstatic, but for the rest of us who want to manage armies of servers in as little time as possible, the 3rd party utilities still have a big edge.

MS will take another rev or two at least to catch up, at which point they'll hopefully merge the functionality of policy-based management with some dashboard reports to show what happened in my backup world last night across all of my servers.

posted @ Thursday, April 03, 2008 6:01 AM by Brent O.

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