Being the first customer to test a new product is bound to spark uncertainty. But entrusting the welfare of a company's core financial, human resources and supply chain management information to a database platform that has never before been tested in any other enterprise? That takes confidence.

For several months now, Microsoft has been doing exactly that: running its SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning software system on the second beta version of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, the company's next-generation data management and analysis platform. Microsoft's Enterprise Data Services group also has migrated its Microsoft FeedStore data warehouse system to SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 to support the needs of diverse applications within the company.

Mike Hatch , senior technology architect of the Enterprise Application Services-SAP group within Microsoft's internal IT organization, concedes that testing new software on production systems like these can be risky. But he says the practice of "dog-fooding" Microsoft products -- as in "eating your own dog food" -- is a crucial and invaluable step in ensuring that the products are truly ready for customers prior to release.

Hatch, who is responsible for all software and hardware supporting Microsoft's SAP R/3 infrastructure, has overseen the migration and testing of SAP R/3 on each release of SQL Server and the Microsoft Windows operating system during the past four years. He and David Campbell, general manager for SQL Server, detailed Microsoft's upgrade and testing experiences with SQL Server 2005 Beta 2 version in a keynote presentation today at the 2004 PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Community Summit in Orlando, Florida -- the largest user-run event of the year dedicated to users of SQL Server.

Hatch earlier sat down with PressPass to describe what his group has learned from testing SQL Server 2005 in a production environment and the value of this dog-fooding practice to Microsoft's product development efforts.