DBAs Bar Door Against Big Bad .Net Wolf (
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The problem is T-SQL, a proprietary language that SQL Server DBAs know well but that's foreign to most .Net developers.Microsoft has been mercilessly tightening the screws between SQL Server and stack components BizTalk Server and Visual Studio—a tighter integration that's making developers gleeful and causing DBAs to cringe.
"If you're a developer, this makes [you] very happy. It has [database administrators] pretty concerned," said Kevin Kline, SQL Server MVP, director of technology for SQL Server Solutions at Quest Software and president of PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server). "You can have code running on SQL Server and you get a bug and you don't know how to code and debug it."
At the heart of the problem is T-SQL, a proprietary stored procedure language that SQL Server DBAs know like the back of their hands but that might as well be Greek to most .Net developers.
With an integration gleam in its eye, Microsoft Corp. has set its sights on demolishing the wall between those two groups. In SQL Server 2005—due to ship in early November—for the first time, the company's CLR (Common Language Runtime) will be integrated into the heart of the database.
That means that instead of being constrained to T-SQL, developers will be able to program to the data tier based on the language that they're most familiar with, such as Visual Basic or C#, to create applications for the database.
Microsoft still intends to support and innovate around the T-SQL language that developers use to build applications for SQL Server, but developers will be able to use the often faster and less code-intensive SQL CLR.
It's easy to see why developers are so happy. CLR is a powerful tool with significant advantage over T-SQL in a few areas, according to Rick Dobson, an author, trainer and Webmaster for ProgrammingMSAccess.com.
It's a compiled language, as opposed to an interpreted one, as is T-SQL, Dobson pointed out. Also, CLR is powerful for computation-intensive tasks, such as string computation, he said.
Click here to read about how the unification of the SQL Server database engine with the CLR environment could evolve to offer developers a powerful model for data manipulation.
For his part, Anders Hejlsberg, a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and the man known as the father of C#, is planning to tackle the integration question at Microsoft's upcoming Professional Developers Conference, according to Microsoft's posted abstracts.
Among other things, Hejlsberg plans to talk about new language features in C# 3.0, including anonymous types that make it possible to create powerful APIs for expressing queries and interacting with objects, XML and databases in a strongly typed, natural way.
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