Microsoft Terraserver: A Look Back At A 10-Year Scalability Research Project That Won’t Die

Tom Barclay, Microsoft Research, San Francisco

Stevenson Hall 1300
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM

An enormous challenge in industrial research is getting research ideas and prototypes into products. Microsoft TerraServer is an industrial research project whose primary focus was to improve the chances of such transfers. In the mid 1990s, Microsoft was rewriting SQL Server from the ground-up to compete with Oracle, Db2, and others in the DBMS marketplace. A key requirement was scalability. The SQL team commissioned Jim Gray's research group to build a real world Internet application that would test the SQL system's ability to scale a single database server to terabytes and demonstrate scalability to end users and potential customers on the Internet for a period of 18 months. This past June, TerraServer logged its tenth year on the Internet and remains popular in the face of competition with Google Maps, Google Earth, Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps, Globe Explorer, and others. This talk will review both the organizational and technical characteristics and accomplishments of the project and how TerraServer led the way to systems like Google Earth (Keyhole), Virtual Earth, and others.