SharePoint 2009: Improvements to Lists architecture

According to a keynote by Bill Gates at the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2008, the next version of SharePoint will feature an improved lists architecture – lists will apparently be more tightly integrated with SQL to allow for more flexibility.

From the keynote address:

Bill Gates: “And so in the case of SharePoint, we’ve got these lists that in some ways are better than tables.

They have rich behavior that is not you don’t see in SQL tables, but then in SQL you have very rich behaviors, including the flexibility of queries, and kind of scale that you can do that goes beyond what you have as lists. So what’s the answer? What you want to get to is having SQL not just have these lists at a layer above the database, but actually have those be native capability, and literally take the richness of tables, but enhanced to do things like we do with lists.

So in the next version of SharePoint we take a big step in terms of being able to put a table in, and have all that SQL capability, or be able to take a lot of those list-type features and have those against tables. This is the kind of roadmap thing that we should probably get into in the breakout sessions, talk about how far we’re going in 14, and get feedback about that. The direction is pretty straightforward. You want list semantics to be in the database engine itself, so that the kind of rich data types, and scaling, and query capability that you almost take for granted when you’re in a SQL environment, that you have those without giving up the reasons that we invented lists, because of the approachability and capabilities you have there.“

Hopefully this means that we’ll be able to utilize lists in more advanced ways without having to worry so much about the performance problems that currently affect lists containing large numbers of items.

This improvement will also mean that teams can implement relational data structures simply by using lists; no need to write data layers, manage connection strings and DB security, database deployments, etc. All one would theoretically need is access to the SharePoint API?

I definitely think there’s a lot of potential here.