SQL Server on a non MS platform? Never!

The analyst community has long been saying that it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft starts porting its applications, especially its server-based business applications, to Linux.

But one Microsoft notable, in the form of Gordon Mangione, corporate vice president, SQL Server Team, made a strong and clear statement that SQL Server would never be ported to other environments, when he addressed developers last week at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.

He was preaching the beauty of web services and how in the forthcoming Yukon version of SQL server, which is currently in beta, a stored procedure in an SQL database can be exposed as a web service, when he said: “Now, some of you are probably scratching your head and going, 'Why would I want to do that?' You know, a question I get asked a lot is, 'Gee, Gord, when are you going to port SQL Server to other operating systems?' Not going to happen. When it comes right down to it, there's just too much of an opportunity cost, too much I can't take advantage of in the underlying operating system, too many things that, frankly, if I had to port to 17 different
flavors, we wouldn't go and do.”

Microsoft’s mission instead is to make SQL interoperable with other environments through web service, or at least this is the implication of Mangione’s comments.

“It's why we built the JDBC driver for SQL Server, and it's why Web services is so critical to everything we do, because it allows you to get access to your data independent of whatever machine you're trying to connect to,” he said. ®

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