Microsoft Aims High on Data Warehouses

This has always been the #1 limiter for SQL in enterprise environments... can the hating stop? Then again, after claiming SQL can't handle larger databases, what else does the competition truly have on SQL Server?

Microsoft Aims High on Data Warehouses: "November 20, 2006 (Computerworld) --
SEATTLE -- Once characterized by its rivals as a database featherweight punching above its weight class, Microsoft Corp. last week said it plans to build two mammoth data warehouses based on its year-old SQL Server 2005 software.

At the annual conference of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) user group, Microsoft said it is designing a 270TB multinode data warehouse for a foreign government that it declined to identify. The software vendor is also working on a 162TB single-node installation for its own marketing department. "

“They can scale and handle data warehouses of any size; we know that now,” said Donald Feinberg, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “I routinely talk to SQL Server customers that have built 7TB data warehouses or Windows Datacenter [systems] with 3,000 users.”