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To: Howard Armstrong who wrote (10373)	7/9/1998 5:57:00 PM
From: Xpiderman	Respond to of 64865

TerraServer says little about SQL Server By John Taschek July 6, 1998 zdnet.com What better way to show the world a new product's power than to show the world itself? Microsoft's TerraServer, obviously intended as a preliminary launching pad for SQL Server 7, seems to do just that. Or maybe not. At first glance, TerraServer appears to be a dazzling display of the scalability of the SQL Server 7 database, which just entered Beta 3. TerraServer hosts a whopping 1 terabyte of geographic images of Earth. The database hosts a quarter-billion user records, most of which are JPEG images from declassified U.S. Geological Survey and Russian satellite photos. The good thing is that this system is electronic commerce-enabled and available from the Web at terraserver.com To run this system, high-speed, large-capacity storage is critical. Microsoft partnered with Digital/Compaq for all the TerraServer hardware, which includes an eight-way 64-bit AlphaServer and 324 9GB StorageWorks drives. Though this configuration is fairly brawny -- Microsoft calls it the "world's largest PC" -- the application itself is simple. In fact, it doesn't really show off the scalability of SQL Server 7, except for its ability to make a lot of data available with simple queries. First, the database consists of only a couple dozen tables, and although the images consume many spindles, the database itself isn't used for transactions. Second, this database adds marginal value over what could be implemented with a searchable, indexed file system. The database doesn't really take advantage of some of the key new technologies that will be implemented in SQL Server 7, including the cost-based optimizer and OLAP capabilities. Lastly, had the database been done in Oracle8, it might look quite different. For example, because SQL Server 7 does not support spatial data or universal data types, the database is bigger than it would have been in Oracle8. Since TerraServer supports at least three levels of zooming in on images, Microsoft has to maintain one image for each level of zoom. Assuming the data is spatially encoded, the same database in Oracle8 would be about one-fifth the size of the database in SQL Server. However, it's unclear if the graphic images stored on TerraServer were spatially encoded. In addition, this was no scalability demonstration, and TerraServer returned some very unscalable messages. For days, I ran into messages saying that the database was unavailable or that too many users were connected. These are not SQL Server messages. Microsoft officials said they had not set up enough front-end Web servers to handle the immense traffic the site drew. Microsoft placed an arbitrary limit on the number of people who could access TerraServer. Still, TerraServer is an interesting project. There aren't that many terabyte databases out there. Microsoft also learned: how to handle high-speed loading of data, how to back it up and how to restore it. The system sits behind Microsoft's firewall, and the company might have wanted to manage bandwidth by force. I interpret this to mean that while Microsoft is still going after the small to medium-size business transaction market, its real goal is to dominate the data warehouse market. Do demos like this work for you? John Taschek can be reached at john_taschek@zd.com. See more Wide Angle columns.