Microsoft’s SQL Server„¢ Scalability

Microsoft’s SQL Server and BackOffice™ products running on Windows NT® Server have evolved to support huge databases and applications. This paper outlines the history and current power of Microsoft SQL Server. It shows that SQL Server scales down to small one-megabyte personal databases and scales up to giant hundred gigabyte databases used by thousands of people. SQL Server achieves this scalability today by supporting symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). Beyond that, Microsoft SQL Server will scale out by partitioning a huge database into a cluster of servers, each storing part of the whole database, and each doing a part of the work. This clustering approach dovetails with the Windows NT Server Cluster architecture. Today, Windows NT Server and Microsoft SQL Server clusters provide high availability – but we are still in the early stages of this product evolution. Microsoft intends to extend its cluster architecture to accommodate modular growth, as well as to automate configuration, maintenance, and programming.