"We can import not the data but information about the data -- to allow us to understand the shape and distribution of data and how often things change," he said. "We can then build a plan to automatically generate data that looks very close to the production data in volume and shape."

Microsoft will release the first community technology preview of the new database edition June 12.

In addition, Microsoft shed some light on the next release of Visual Studio, which is now code-named Orcas and is expected ship sometime after the next release of Windows.

Prashant Sridharan, group product manager in Microsoft's developer division, said the next version of Visual Studio will add portfolio management and compliance tools. These new tools will use data gathered from the various roles within the team system to provide more visibility into the overall application development life cycle, he added.

"The team accumulates a bunch of data throughout its course of development, like how many bugs is my software creating and how quickly I can solve those," Sridharan said. "We want to build tools to aggregate data from a bunch of different teams."