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September 2005 - Posts

Monday, September 26, 2005 9:29 AM

Adding intellisense and refactoring to the T-SQL editor

One of the features I would like to see in our tools for SQL Server is a T-SQL language service. This would give customers features like intellisense, text completion, refactoring (e.g. renaming a table everywhere at once), error highlighting (as in Word’s red squiggly underlining), and host of other features that C# and Visual Basic have in Visual Studio 2005. Unfortunately, implementing a language service for T-SQL requires solving some difficult problems.
Posted by AnthonyBloesch | 18 Comments
Wednesday, September 21, 2005 9:00 AM

How should database models be persisted?

The conventional way to persist the semantic data in a graphical database design/modeling tool is as a single binary file. This is easy to implement but does not mesh well with the text oriented tools developers typically use (e.g. editors, source code control systems, file diff and file searching utilities). In addition, if something goes wrong recovering your data is difficult. I think a better way to persist semantic information is as a small number of T-SQL creation scripts.
Posted by AnthonyBloesch | 3 Comments
Tuesday, September 20, 2005 9:08 AM

T-SQL casing conventions feedback

Thanks everyone for the great blog and email comments on how we should deal with T-SQL casing conventions. Here is a summary of that feedback.
Posted by AnthonyBloesch | 1 Comments
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Thursday, September 15, 2005 1:41 PM

Uppercase or lowercase T-SQL keywords

I have been rethinking using uppercase letters for T-SQL keywords. Readability research shows that uppercase keywords are harder to read and experience shows they are harder to type. Is it just tradition that keeps T-SQL developers uppercasing keywords?
Posted by AnthonyBloesch | 8 Comments
Wednesday, September 14, 2005 11:29 AM

When to use SQL Server 2005's XML data columns

SQL Server 2005’s support for XML has improved substantially. The new internal representation of XML and XML indexes supports much faster queries and updates. SQL Server 2005 supports querying and updating XML with XQuery, a powerful second-generation DML language for XML. Finally, SQL Server provides good support for converting between and relating relational and XML based data. Now that XML data has such good support in, the choice of when to use an XML column and when to use standard relation
Posted by AnthonyBloesch | 0 Comments
Friday, September 09, 2005 1:25 PM

Surrogate keys

After you have been building databases for a while, surrogate keys become second nature but many people do not know about them so I thought I should devote some time to them. In addition, a constant challenge is choosing between using an int or a uniqueidentifier (i.e. GUID) as a surrogate key and I thought this would be a great forum to get some feedback on when you should use one or the other.
Posted by AnthonyBloesch | 66 Comments
Wednesday, September 07, 2005 2:01 PM

Database design made easier

Compared with the development experience for, say, C# and Visual Basic the T-SQL development experience is terrible—no intellisense, refactoring, unit testing, code coverage or even good error reporting. Yet many developers spend large amounts of time building T-SQL code. SQL Server comes with a great set of tools for DBAs and for operational management but the T-SQL development experience is not even close to what I get with C#.
Posted by AnthonyBloesch | 80 Comments
 
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