All of you who follow me, know that I've kept pretty good tabs on the backup wars as I was there not only from the beginning, I appear to have been a major player. And while I haven't kept you all up to date with what's going on now, I will soon. What I want to talk about now is a new war that's about to be waged. This is completely uncharted territory just like backups were when LiteSpeed came onto the scene. W All of you who follow me, know that I’ve kept pretty good tabs on the backup wars as I was there not only from the beginning, I appear to have been a major player. And while I haven’t kept you all up to date with what’s going on now, I will soon.What I want to talk about now is a new war that’s about to be waged. This is completely uncharted territory just like backups were when LiteSpeed came onto the scene.What I’m talking about is SQL accelerators. This is one of the perks of being in the media is I’m always getting first looks at new technology. Well, at PASS last week I spent some time with the SQL Nitro guys and they showed me what they had to offer. Frankly, it was even hard for them to get me to take a look because I’ve seen these products before and they just didn’t work. However, when they pulled me into the booth it only took them about 30secs to peak my interest. I not only saw a quite impressive demo, they let me get on the box myself and play around a little and it worked with the stuff I threw at it. But that was just a demo box and nowhere near a real environment. So they gave me a handful of licenses to put in my lab and I’ve been playing with it for about a week now, and so far the results look good. It’s still way too early for me to give it an honest blessing, but I’m liking what I see.For those of you who don’t know, SQL accelerators are something the network guys have enjoyed for a long time now. They compress the network packets so you’re actually sending less information across the wire. This is a completely untapped area for DBAs to tune. I mean, let’s face it… you can only go so far tuning your queries and your box. If the network doesn’t keep up then you can’t exactly strip it out as easily as you can get a new server or just increase your memory. So this will allow DBAs to finally conquer the network layer of their performance problems as well.I call this the Happier Wars because once this product gets battle-proven, everyone will follow with their own version. You’ll start seeing accelerators pop up all over the place, and then we’ll see the SQL Accelerator Wars. I only hope they’ll be happier and more civil than the backup wars were. But whatever you do just remember… you heard it from me first. Databases