July 2005 - Posts
This is the new name for LongHorn and the beta is scheduled to be released on August 3rd, 2006. MSDN subscribers can download it from the subscribers site, but I believe it is around 2.5GB. So watch out for some looooong coffee breaks while the download happens :-)
Lots of interesting articles and explanations can be found at: Windows Vista.
On 27th, I gave a session at
Intel, Bangalore on the CLR integration features of SQL Server 2005 and what are some of the new use cases that are possible. The session went on very well and I had some interesting questions on the integration capabilities. From the various CLR sessions that I've given, the overall sense that I get is that on one side, people are interested in this new feature and on the other side, there is scepticism on performance, usability, use cases enabled, security etc. Both of these are valid and this can be dispelled only by “adopting” the CLR integration into the product development and working with it. There are many use cases where CLR integration will be useful (I can think of atleast 10 things that I can now do with our flagship product line :-)).
Last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. Been very busy with work and also with some campus recruitment. This year, I had the opportunity to go back to the home town for some campus recruitment. It was good fun to go back and relive the days that I had spent there. The recruitment aspect did not go very well as we did not get the type of people that we needed, but the 2 days were worth the visit to rekindle my memories. Also spent some time working out for an SSB issue for one of my friends who wanted to know how service broker routes messages between databases in the same instance. Turns out that I need to write some more articles on this subject ASAP.
BI (Business Intelligence) is a catchy field these days and SQL Server provides ample support to build BI applications very easily. However, for many, the field of BI is quite new and there are a lot of terms to reconcile with like: data mart, data warehouse, data mining, cube's etc. If you want a quick introduction to these terms and what they mean and how to design for them, then look at this free eBook: A Jump Start to SQL Server BI. This book provides a good introduction to BI concepts and expands on it to explain how SQL Server 2005 has matured for BI applications.
A good read for a weekend! The book is around 140 pages and contains samples too. Enjoy.
This is a very hot and debatable topic. Something that you can spend your entire evening on :-) During my TechEd 2005 visits across India and giving sessions on SQL Server 2005, many a times, the question that people had was “why integrate the CLR inside of SQL Server 2005” and “what should I now know as a DBA”? Valid questions and will require some sort of an answer.
To answer the first question as to why the CLR integration was done, well, the core reason which I think was well deserved was to provide a type-safe and secure model for developing “extensions” to SQL Server. In the past, you could extend SQL Server only through extended stored procedures and these were filled with all sorts of issues. With the CLR integration now done, you can write .NET code for extending SQL Server and have the entire power of the .NET Framework BCL at your disposal (well, not all, but many of them). Typical examples that I have seen are an email address validation routine written as a .NET code callable from the SQL Server. Implementing this sort of a check in T-SQL can take many lines of code and maintenance headache, whereas in the .NET world, you can use Regular Expressions and finish the same in just a couple of lines! That apart, there are truly some scenarios where T-SQL is just not suited for the job and vice-versa (where .NET is not suited inside SQL Server). This is the decision that DBAs will have to take as they interact with developers in their organizations and formulate the standards of coding etc.
Greg Low, a SQL Server MVP from Australia, has a good webcast that addresses this problem. In this webcast, he gives an introduction to the .NET Framework and the basic elements that a DBA will need to know and then proceeds to show some examples of typical code. The interesting part of the webcast is the set of “best practices” of sorts that DBAs will have to adopt to deal with this new extension to SQL Server and this is good to know. You can view the presentation here: A SQL Server DBA's Guide to the .NET Framework and CLR Integration.
If you are looking at a quick resource to get you started on core SQL Server 2005 topics, then this site could be for you. Microsoft has a series of 9 E-Learning courses around SQL Server 2005 that are free and can be accessed from here. Basically, you can view the courses either online or offline (although offline did not work for me, since the download just got stuck in-between). The online version is pretty good, except that the labs require connection to hosted environments which did not work for me. I also did not really expect them to work, since the performance may be a bit slow and I can anyways replicate the exercise on my local build of SQL Server 2005.
Overall, the content is good (with a few typos here and there :-)), but it is worthwhile for the content coverage and will serve as a quick start guide to getting upto speed on SQL Server 2005 (I just finished around 50% of the .NET Integration course). Have fun!
During TechEd 2005, I mentioned in all my sessions about new SQL Server articles on XML, since a lot of people wanted to know the new features and some of my examples included some XML code. Over time, I have seen the following XML articles appear at MSDN and these will give you a good start on the basic capabilities, features, best practices etc.
Back from Delhi and it marks the end of the TechEd 2005 saga. Delhi was a great experience. Am getting into Delhi after nearly 10 years and its changed so much that I don't think I remember any place any more. The sessions of SOA and ADO.NET 2.0 were well attended. SOA as usual was an eye-opener to many and there were interesting questions on its usage, applicability etc. ADO.NET 2.0 drew a large crowd and I was able to cover all the major improvements. As usual, features like "Query Notifications", "Asynchronous Commands" and "Provider Independent APIs" drew extra attention. Personally, I like the provider independent API feature a lot as it can open up the cases for writing some really cool code and its also a good implementation of the "factory" design pattern from Microsoft.
I intend to spend the next couple of weeks in writing some articles about the new features of ADO.NET and publishing it onto some sites out there. Why am I not publishing it on my site? Well, I intend to do a complete rehaul of my site soon and so do not want to make updates to it, lest I draw more dependence on the URLs. Let's see, if I decide to update my existing site itself, you may see more content on my site.
That said, overall, am very pleased with the entire TechEd trip and the various sessions that I was involved in. It was a great experience travelling to all the 5 cities and I do hope that I get to do it again, next year!