What You Need to Know
Yukon represents a significant investment by Microsoft and encompasses years of development. SQL Server customers will find diverse and valuable features in Yukon; however, it lacks several competitive and promised features (for example, clustering and hash partitioning). In addition, customers have been paying for Software Assurance maintenance agreements during this protracted development, most often with the expectation of receiving functional value for their investment. The adoption and migration to Yukon will be slowed by a lack of compelling features driving any single customer segment, and by the Enterprise Agreement/Software Assurance licensing issues. Microsoft's dilution across three audiences with a diverse set of product features will probably leave most users less than satisfied. Potential customers also will find that Yukon alone does not provide major features that will motivate them to move quickly to SQL Server.
Analysis
Microsoft has been talking about the next release of SQL Server, code-named Yukon, for about three years. The Yukon feature set was frozen in late November 2003, the first beta release is under way, and the second beta release is expected by mid-2004. This protracted release and rollout, combined with conflicting messages on the content of Yukon, have created confusion and uncertainty that will impede Yukon's adoption.
Since it began exposing Yukon in October 2000, Microsoft has characterized its strategy for Yukon as:
- Establishing the "universal data store" behind the new file system, WinFS, expected in the next version of Windows, which is code-named Longhorn
- Providing a leap forward in database management system (DBMS) scalability and availability
- Strengthening the integration of SQL Server with the .NET Framework
- Delivering significant DBMS security improvements
- In addition, Microsoft has targeted three audiences: IT professionals/database administrators, developers and end users. The breadth of this set of goals and the target audiences are laudable.
- However, the complexity of the combination of these two dimensions is too much for even Microsoft to handle with a single release.
