File this one under “You’re doing it wrong”
November 13, 2008
June 19, 2008
T-SQL Intellisense for SQL 2005, There’s no going back.
I have had SQL Server 2008 Installed (Feb2008 CTP) for a few months now and the intellisense that comes with Management Studio is really really useful. So much so that when I find myself using Management Studio on some other machine, I find that I miss it immediately. For me there’s no going back. It’s one of the best usability features that is included in 2008. I used it as much as I could with any SQL Server connection I made.
Unfortunately, Intellisense is being dropped for connections to SQL Server 2005 in RTM and RC0. I was warned here. Also see here.
Apparently the reasoning is that while the #1 goal of Intellisense is to allow people to script more efficiently, On 2005, any incorrect suggestions will cause developers to spend more time figuring out what went wrong. I totally disagree. Intellisense has been so useful that I can’t see how any potential wrong-version intellisense-confusion could possibly outweigh the benefits. I don’t believe them when they say that intellisense on 2005 would negatively impact development.
They also complain that supporting multiple versions of SQL Server would multiply time and cost to develop. As an end user, I don’t care. Redgate has intellisense. I don’t see why MS can’t. MS should also consider this a great opportunity to improve their SQL Server management tools.
Well yesterday I installed RC0 and sure enough 2005 Intellisense support has been dropped. I missed it immediately. In fact, I have some colleagues who plan to stay on the Feb CTP until their license expires.
If only there were something we could do.
There is! And it’s (slightly) better than a petition. Vote at Microsoft’s Connect site on this issue:
http://connect.microsoft.com/SQLServer/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=341872
May 13, 2008
How useful is connect.microsoft.com?
So I’ve been using Microsoft connect for SQL Suggestions and the response so far for my three issues is:
- Call MS support for that problem
- Defer your request.
- No comment
I wanted to see what other peoples’ experiences were and so I took a very quick survey for bugs and suggestions submitted on some random days older than a week (May 1 and May 2) to be exact. Here are the results of my survey
- no comment yet (6 issues)
- active dialogue waiting on MS (4 issues)
- active dialogue waiting on submitter (4 issues)
- already fixed in existing release (2 issues)
- by design or won’t fix (8 issues)
- to be considered for a later release(4 issues)
- fixed for next release (4 issues)
So how does MS come out at the end of this? Quite well I think, they’re getting a lot of valuable feedback. How do customers come out at the end of this? So-so. I think MS could do better. The first two categories of issues describe issues that seem orphaned. That’s 10 issues out of 32. If MS had a better track record than that, connect.microsoft.com would be seen as a real place to be heard. That would encourage even more feedback.
Another thing that I hope MS is doing is to place a larger weight on feedback that would help improve scalability/performance. This is because if there is feedback that could help MS become a better Enterprise-level platform, then this feedback would be fairly sparse compared to the other feedback requests that deal with UI improvements say. My guess is that if the SQL Server team spends time on enterprise-level improvements, the ROI would be at least as great as UI improvements.
April 29, 2008
Things you'll find here.
I hope to post thoughts on SQL Server. Fixes, revelations, troubleshooting experiences that I don’t want to relive and maybe some more light hearted things.
