ReadWriteEnterprise

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.