So it’s official.Kraig Brockschmidt has blogged an update on SQL Server Modelling.As widely rumoured, he has confirmed that Quadrant is dead. The shock is that the model repository has expired as well.
M is still hanging on in there, but we don’t know anything more about what the future holds. For some time, the official word has been that it would arrive in conjunction with a future SQL Server release.I detect a possible change here, in that Kraig simply says ‘We are continuing our investment in this technology and will share our plans for productization once they are concrete’. For my part, I maintain that tying ‘M’ to the SQL Server licence would be a really bad move.I know that every time Doug Purdy (who has recently left Microsoft to join Facebook) was challenged on this, he kept saying…no, SQL Server is a platform, not a product…watch this space. However, in the next breath it certainly sounded as if ‘M’ was in danger of being subsumed under a product license.No, no, no.Set it free to be used across Microsoft’s platform. That platform is not SQL Server. It remains Windows, and for developers, it is Windows (on-premises and cloud) mediated through .NET.