Microsoft and future OSs - Cairo comes home

 

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Posted on 9 Aug 2001 at 15:08

The pieces are coming together for a clear shift in the way Microsoft does data storage. It is coming full circle, right back to the unified storage model of "Cairo", promised back in the early 1990s as the super-OS built upon Windows NT.

A complete storage story

As I have been postulating for a while in my columns in PC Pro, Microsoft needs to complete its storage story. It has too many ways of storing relatively similar items, and a simplification is long overdue.

This is coming, and it lays the roadmap for the next 4-5 years of major Windows operating system changes. From the users's perspective, the changes will be small or even invisible - Microsoft is a past master at changing things only as quickly as the majority of the user base can manage.

From a technical perspective, the changes are quite profound. They focus on four main areas: Active Directory, SQL Server, Exchange Server and the filesystem itself. There is a clear interweaving of the changes both to BackOffice products and to the base OS.

Yukon

Microsoft recently admitted, at the Barcelona TechEd conference, that one of the design goals for "Yukon" - the codename for SQL Server 2003 due in summer 2003 after a year long beta programme - was to make it better at handling semi-structured and unstructured data. There can be no question as to its performance today when running as an RDBMS store - the TPCC and SAP benchmarks clearly show that Microsoft is a leading candidate in server speed. But SQL Server has never been optimised to work well on more randomly structured data. This is a very important announcement by Microsoft, because the rumours suggest that "Kodiak", the next major release of Exchange Server, will use "Yukon" as its store rather than the current JET/EDB/ESE storage engine. If that is the case, then Yukon will need to handle the extraordinary storage flexibility that Exchange Server offers today.

Yukon will be the first full-scale real .NET server from Microsoft. In other words, the first BackOffice engine that has been built using Visual Studio .NET and the Common Runtime. We know this, because Microsoft has admitted that Transact SQL (TSQL) will become yet another .NET language, in the same vein as Visual Basic and C#. In other words, Yukon runs with the Common Runtime as an integral part of its engine design, and you will be able to use any .NET language to write stored procedures that sit close to the raw engine.

It is worth noting that both the Exchange Server and SQL Server teams are now reporting to the same key people inside Microsoft, clearly indicating that a major rationalisation is taking place on the storage front.

Exchange Server moving

The move of Exchange Server off the JET/ESE store has some other profound impacts, though. Active Directory in Windows 2000 and XP uses JET/ESE as its store. Since Active Directory is the grown-up child of the directory service found in Exchange Server 4/5/5.5, this is to be expected - it came from a JET background and has stayed in that storage area under Windows 2000.

The move of Active Directory from JET/ESE to SQL Server is something that Microsoft simply refuses to discuss, even privately. It is probably the most sensitive topic around in the Windows Server arena. The reason is clear - Windows XP Server will ship at the end of this year and will continue to use the JET/ESE engine for one final fling. Only when we get to the next release of Windows Server, codenamed "Longhorn" due in mid 2003, will we see steps to move Active Directory onto SQL Server Yukon. Obviously Microsoft doesn't want anything to confuse the XP Server launch, and thus storage and directory services are going to be the story for 2002, and most definitely not something to be discussed before the end of this year.