Microsoft has made the community technology preview of “Project Madison”, the culmination of the company’s DATAllegro acquisition last year.
Madison
is Microsoft’s answer to calls for a massively scalable data warehousing solution. The appliance partitions large tables across multiple physical nodes, each with dedicated CPU, memory and storage and running its own instance of SQL Server. Microsoft calls the product's parallel design "Ultra Shared Nothing."
Appliances ranging from 8 nodes to 20 nodes are now ready to host customers for early evaluation, Microsoft officials stated on the company’s SQL Server News Blog.
The preview comes at the end of a busy month for Microsoft's database business. The company released previews of SQL Azure and SQL Server 2008 Release 2 this month as well.
The initial preview for Madison is limited to customers that meet specific criteria for installation. Generally availability is currently planned for the first half of 2010. For more information on registration for
Madison
technology previews, email mdsontap@microsoft.com.
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