ReadWriteEnterprise

The folks at Quest Software have written a white paper describing their top performance killers for SharePoint (registration required). It is worth summarizing the results here, for those of you that still use this tool and are getting complaints from your end users, or who haven't looked at your storage requirements lately.

Of all the software technologies that are least suited to getting a makeover that's "about the experience," you'd think databases would rank pretty far down. The database experience, if there is one, is typically about accuracy, reliability, and speed. Certainly Oracle's frequent measurements ("5x," "10x," "20x" and so on) are all about those metrics.

But Microsoft has found an angle with respect to SQL Server 2012, the second round of announcements for which came this morning in Seattle. The new angle starts with multitouch, but then it runs deeper, touching on the larger problem of data getting fragmented and redundantly duplicated as it gets used and visualized.

Unstructured data, for lack of a more poetic phrase, exists. In fact, there's more of it now than at any time in history - the growth rate Forrester experts cite is 80% annually, and perhaps rising. All this year, analysts have been asking whether Microsoft would come to embrace unstructured data, or what some call "NoSQL databases." But by now, it's grown so large that it's encompassing Microsoft.

So amid today's stunning news that the company plans to integrate Hadoop support in Windows Server, even insofar as to consider adopting it as a role alongside Web server (IIS) and DNS server, there's this structured database management system whose roadmap to general availability was announced this morning at the PASS Summit in Seattle.

This week Microsoft announced its intentions to bring Hadoop to SQL Server and Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW). PDW was introduced last year and brought centralized data warehousing capabilities to SQL Server.

"As a first step, we will soon release a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of two new Hadoop connectors - one for SQL Server and one for PDW," the SQL Server Team blog says.

Project Barcelona, a new project in the works from Microsoft, will give enterprises Web crawler-like tools for searching and storing information. The crawlers will search Microsoft products such as SQL Server, Excel and SharePoint and extra metadata. Barcelona Index Server will then serve-up the metadata, making it easier to find and access business information across the enterprise. There will also be Barcelona tools designed specifically for database administrators.

According to the project's FAQ: "Project Barcelona however is not a centrally controlled metadata repository in the traditional sense in that the overall design embraces the decentralized and web-like nature of the modern enterprise."