I saw a few people talking about their jobs and one mentioned that they were doing a bunch of heavy math in SQL Server and talking about how SQL Server is lacking in some of the statistical functions that are being used.
That's not terribly surprising as I'm sure very few people use any aggregates beyond SUM, COUNT, MIN, and MAX, but with the addition of the CLR in SQL Server 2005, there's no reason that you can't write your own routines. I'm not sure how well these perform in large scale situations, but they are a great way to expand the capabilities of the platform.
It did get me thinking about an interesting Friday poll. Since many of you work in all different types of industries, I wanted to ask you:
Where is SQL Server lacking as a platform?
I'm sure we'll get answers all across the board. I've heard plenty of people say SSIS isn't a real ETL platform, that messaging isn't handled great in SQL Server, scale out, large scale systems, and more. In some sense I'm sure all of these complaints have some validity, though I suspect some are application issues and not SQL Server issues.
What I'm really looking for in today's poll is some industry specific area that you work in and find SQL Server lacking in it's functionality. Whether or not you can improve things with the SQL CLR isn't important, but more that the base platform is lacking for your systems.
I've worked in quite a few areas and I've found SQL Server to meet our needs very well in almost all situations, but none of them have been extreme where we were pushing the limits of the platform. That's something I hear about regularly from those of you doing so in the real world.
Let us know what holds you back in SQL Server (I'm sure Microsoft is listening) and if you've creatively solved something, we'd like to hear that as well.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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