Routinely accused of bloating Windows and Office, Microsoft has acted more like a skinny teenage boy with enterprise apps like SQL Server: desperate to bulk up.

King of the middleweight databases, SQL Server has yet to be fully accepted by the big boys, admits Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server & Tools division. "Really large data warehouses and extremely large scale-up apps are the last high-end problems" remaining for SQL Server, Muglia said in a keynote at the PASS (Professional Association of SQL Server) users' conference in Seattle on Monday.