In Defense of SQL: The Family Picnic & Dropping SQL Server Features
Paul Randal recently streaked through the the family picnic and tossed-down a hornet’s nest on the dessert table by starting a meme on which five things Microsoft should drop from their SQL Server product. I came to this party late – and uninvited – but I’m going to go ahead and drop my junk in the potato salad with the following statement:
Sure there are a multitude of things we power-user-guru-super-ultra-sexy-SQL Pros would love to see removed – but we’re not the only users/customers that touch the product.
I’d love to see Full Recovery by default go away, in addition to see auto_close, auto_shrink, MSDTC, xp_cmdshell, the constantly-changing and contrived install process, percent-as-default for growth settings, RECOVERY by default on restores, GUIDS as a clustered index candidate…
However I’ve also seen bloggers chime in with items on their list that, while a little ridiculous for power-users to use on a consistent basis are still key for those getting started with Microsoft SQL Server. I’ll admit right now too that when I get stuck on a difficult or kludgey join I’ll find myself at times going into Graphical Query Editor to work through the initial architecture of a join before optimizing it in T/SQL.
We all started at the same place when it came to SQL Server: the starting line. We can’t disparage those that just started racing because we’ve been doing it for 10+ years already.
Some things deserve to die – they should be materialized, taken to an open field, and beaten with a baseball bat. Some things should be left to help those just starting out. After all, we want to bring more family to this picnic despite all the hornets.
Oh, I’d stay away from the potatoe salad if I were you.