A visit to the Microsoft Newseum | ZDNet
Summary
One gets the impression that Mr. Whitehorn might be a bit of a one trick pony - someone whose Microsoft related skills outweigh his responsibilities to his employer - if only because he doesnt seem to know that the facilities he needs were available on Ingres for BSD in 1981 and, in more advanced form, via Postgres on Linux or Solaris now. Aside from installation hassles ( "In three days I went back to bare metal five times before everything was present and correct") I saw nothing to suggest that anything he did couldnt have been done about equally well, albeit with much more difficulty and cost, with Unify 4.0 on NCR Unix in 1988, with Informix on SunOS in 1990, or with Illustra on Solaris in 1995. I have notes from a 1988 project review suggesting that a firm in Fort Collins had 12,000 production 160MB disks hooked up to BSD Vaxen using Unitree and now you can pretty much achieve comparable storage and performance on a PC. More to the point, Whitehorn doesnt detail his project much beyond bragging about the 1TB database size and his use of Microsofts toolset - but as far as I know those tools dont incorporate anything thats really new, with most of the improvements since the 2003 server stack being unabashed imports from earlier Unix and open source products. Basically, if theres home grown Microsoft technology in the 2008 server stack I dont see it - but what I do see is powerful ideas made easily accessible to people with limited technical skills.
