I was really sad to hear that Arthur C Clarke died today. For those that enjoyed his work, it’s worth watching his “goodbye” video he made on the occasion of his birthday in December 2007. He knew at that time that the end was near. I particularly liked his choice of a Rudyard Kipling poem to read at the end. You’ll find the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLXQ7rNgWwg
2008-03-19
One of the things I really don’t like in the Declarative Management Framework is the term “On change - prevent” for the execution mode. Given we don’t have INSTEAD OF DDL triggers and only AFTER DDL triggers, we can’t *prevent* these things at all. All we can do is roll them back after they happen. I think the name should be changed to “On change - rollback” to reflect what’s actually happening.
2008-03-19
Hi Folks,
SQL Down Under show 35 with guest SQL Server DPE Evangelist Roger Doherty is now available for download from www.sqldownunder.com .
In the show, Roger discusses what developers are looking forward to in SQL Server 2008.
Enjoy!
Regards,
Greg
2008-03-14
While on site this week, another common problem that I see everywhere arose again.
When you need to format currency, you use the “c” format right? It’s in nearly every set of course materials I’ve ever seen.
In many cases, that’s wrong!
Take a long hard think about whether you really want the monetary values that you display automatically converting to the client system’s currency. If you are reporting financial figures, for example, is it really appropriate that they should mysteriously suddenly change from dollars to yen because the client is based in Zama City rather than in New York City? Not likely. A million dollars in sales might be good but a million yen in sales not quite so good :-)
2008-03-14
I spent time working with Reporting Services again today on a client site. The complexity of the reports we were working on reminded me that I really, really don’t like seeing T-SQL scripts (or really any business logic) embedded in reports.
DBAs tend to be considered a conservative bunch. One thing they’re usually conservative about is refactoring their databases. In many cases, this is because they have little idea what they will break when they make database changes. I’ve seen countless organisations that have allowed direct access to tables from client Access-based applications and have then lost control of the ability to ever change anything in the database because of the hundreds of little applications and reports that they might then break. I spend a lot of time talking to them about how to regain control of the situation.
2008-03-11
Hi Folks,
SQL Down Under show 34 with guest SQL Server MVP Geoff Hiten is now available for download from www.sqldownunder.com . In this show, Geoff discusses SQL Server clustering, SANs and magic SAN dust.
Enjoy!
Regards,
Greg
2008-03-07
SQL Server Data Services was announced today at MIX. This new offering from Microsoft provides Internet-based data services using RESTful interfaces like those provided by ADO.NET Data Services.
This is going to enable some outstanding new applications.
Apply for the beta here now.
2008-03-06
Hi Folks,
SQL Down Under show 33 with SQL Server MVP Allen White discussing the automating of administration using SMO and Powershell is available for download from www.sqldownunder.com .
Enjoy!
Regards,
Greg
2008-02-29
In a previous post, I mentioned lessons I learned from what I think Progress made mistakes at. However, when looking at the implementation of LINQ in .NET, I think much could have been learned from these types of applications and tools.
At the time I used to use it, Progress applications implicitly has a database context. It’s often said that over 90% of applications are data-related. This is the argument for why data libraries shouldn’t be an add-on to the language but should be baked in.
2008-02-25
Alphatross posted an interesting reply to my blog entry about LINQ and Entity Framework terminology. He asked if I’d worked with the Progress DBMS. I have. Here are my thoughts on it. Obviously others will have a different view of history but I mention Progress over and over again when I’m teaching classes as three examples related to them really hit home for me.
I worked with Progress for many years, starting in about 1983 through to some time in the 90’s.
2008-02-25
