Calling All Editing Buffs
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I use Epsilon programmer's editor (little E for PC, evolved from Emacs) which I learned at Carnegie Mellon almost 20 years ago. Notepad/Wordpad and application development environments with built-in editors have made it hard to explain to DBAs and to developers what a real programmer's editor is. Epsilon is more useful and flexible than specialized "data cleansing" tools as well. In my view, a person who doesn't have a tool that performs a regular expression search is not a **real** programmer.
Query Analyzer does its job; Epsilon does its job; they work well together. Code repository is a separate job, not to be confounded with editing.
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data analyst replies, "On the sides that we can see.." -
Feature: Auto Script generating
Along the same lines as centralized code such, but a scripting tool to help you pass the same code to multiple servers quickly, for example, you have a script, sproc etc, that you run against every server in your organization. It'd be nice to be able to select each sever from a list and have the code to run it against each server generated for you so you can just hit run. Sure I Can do it with more code, but it'd be great if I didn't have to. Something along the lines of what Hyena by Systemtools can do for network administration.
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From the article:
"The plan is to give them the features only if they promise to build the product we want. No ‘we'll look into it' or ‘we'll see what we can do'. I'm only turning over the list if they promise to give us our features in a fairly reasonable timeframe."
Do you really think that is productive? How can a vendor promise features if they don't even know what they are before you are requiring them to commit? Don't get me wrong...I love this idea of compiling a list of feature requests as a community but I think it should be done in an open way so we can build off each other's ideas.
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I second that... what are your ideas?
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i really miss the rectangular copy feature of Brief, how many times do you get an email thats got text pasted in column formatting that you only want to use columns 20 thru 30 for the task at hand.
you can't do anything like that in a microsoft editor...
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The include/exclude lby line, line/column/block of code for edit change/replace of a venerable old product - TSO SPF/EDIT from the mainframe world. The global search and replace regular expressions of EditPadLite from the windows world (actually snagged from the Unix world). Then add some of the powerful one key/control key commands of the 'vi' editor from the Unix world.
RegardsRudy KomacsarSenior Database Administrator"Ave Caesar! - Morituri te salutamus."
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I have to agree with katesl on the code repository. It sounds like what you want is a shared folder somewhere. I mean, that's what we use at my company and it works quite well. QA defaults to the same open directory, I open up whichever script I need and start running code to troubleshoot/fix whatever problem comes up. It's not a terribly complicated solution to that poblem, but it works quite well.
Rational Anarchy -
One of the features they pulled from 2005 is the Auto Complete feature. This is helpful for someone who is new to a DB/Table, as well as improves the ability to quickly add items needed.
Would like to see one where the AutoComplete works across Databases and Servers.
Also, ability to easily go to a graphical view and back to scipt mode (think MS Access, or Enterprise Manager Views), but also smart enough to handle CASE and other statements that normally are not graphically displayed.
Able to create/learn your coding style, and apply to code (Formatting Script), this includes use of Tabs, how to structure SELECT statments, your Column List, etc.
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I wish MS would just make the changes, why should we have to depend on 3rd party vendors?
Some of the most obvious ones that should have been in QA long ago and will be very disappointing if they are not in 2005:
Parenthesis () checker!!!!!! Please don't make me yet again check manually the ltrim(rtrim(str())) statement I just wronte. - As a side note, why the heck isn't there an alltrim() in T-SQL????
Intellisense/AutoComplete! Functions (substring, dateadd, etc) and procs should give you a tool tip to remind you of arguments as you type. Tables and view should have Intellisense so you can type "select authors. " and have a list of all the fields from the table authors.
Auto Correct! How many times have you typed "selcet col from table"?
Code Snippets! Something better then templetes. Also, when I type "case" or "if" the IDE should know what is coming next and create the outline of the construct.
Auto Formatting! Indent and format views, procs, and adhoc queries.
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Consider that SQL Server runs only on top of Windows, so we assume copy and paste between windows. I edit complex scripts in one window, using the editor I use for all editing, and paste into the Query Analyzer window. There is no reason for applications running on top of Windows to have their own built-in "intelligent" editors, each one of which would work slightly differently. The editor I use has paren matching and all that, has had it for 20 years, because it is a **programmer's** editor.
I make a data dictionary in the format most convenient for me for every database I work with extensively; and with a macro in the editor and the data dictionary in a second window of the editing session, I can type "select 'table'" and have that become "select 'columnList'"-- no problem.
About "alltrim()"-- please don't ask Microsoft to load SQL Server with unnecessary junk. Like Bertrand Russell with respect to math, and inspired by Occam's Razor, I want the smallest set of functions possible that, when nested, build all capabilities.
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"Look, those sheep have been shorn."
data analyst replies, "On the sides that we can see.."
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