The Microsoft relational engine

Microsoft offers three very successful database products, FoxPro, Access and SQL Server. While SQL Server excels in multi-user transaction performance, Access and its underlying Jet engine excel as an end-user and development tool for desktop and client-server applications. One of our top priorities is to improve the integration of these two products. With respect to their query processing capabilities, we plan on combining the strengths of SQL Server with those of Access. SQL Server's strengths are focused on management of very large tables, server-side cursors, and the use of stored procedures as scripts and as triggers. Access strengths are queries over multiple servers, updatable query results, and bit-mapped processing. In our next generation of products, SQL Server will employ new query processing technology. Both optimization and execution will be based on an extensible set of operators. We are focusing on the relational algebra augmented with a few operators such as the top operator found in Access, and suitable loops-, index-, sort-, hash-, and bitmap-based execution algorithms. Moreover, we are planning on executing these algorithms both sequentially and in parallel. We have four design goals, namely functionality, performance, scalability, and extensibility.