Where Do I Want To Go Today? - From the Field 2

Taking a note from Microsoft's own page, I decided to share some of my wishes for where I want SQL Server to go. Today.

Well I've had great responses to this series and I'm taking another week off from my own thoughts and adding in some of the suggestions I've received. I've provided my own comments as well and I'd love to see more feedback on these as well as on my thoughts.

DTS Security (from Ludo B.)

Security on jobs and DTS packets.

It should be possible to create security roles for jobs and DTS packets. The possibility to make a Windows global group owner of a DTS or Job would also be a great improvement.

Steve:

Fantastic!!

This is one I'd like as well. How often do we want to set up roles for people to work with DTS packages only. Not schedule jobs, not mess with anything else in msdb, just develop packages. I know you can do this, but why the hoops? I'd think this would be a snap for the SQL Dev team.

Same thing for the jobs. I'm not a fan of allowing anyone to schedule jobs and I truly hate the issues with a job owner's credentials not being found and the job failing. I tend to make all my jobs owned by "sa", but scheduling packages or other items cause problems. How about (easily) allowing jobs to be owned by a group? Or the group that owns the DTS package. That would be great!

Smart Query Analyzer (from Markus E.)

Query analyzer with intellisense.

Steve:

I think this is coming in the new Yukon, however it's been long overdue. Having the system stored procedures with intellisense would be great. I'm not positive how this would work ergonomically with TSQL, but it would be helpful.

One solution I thought of would be to have the T-SQL outline and a sample pop in a non-modal window for reference. Make it dockable or not in QA so I could move it around or refer to is as I'm trying to code that little used feature.

Better Templates (from Markus E.)

You define a template in a certain table or code snippet and give it a name; in your SQL-code you use the name an it will be automatically replaced with the template at runtime if you change the template it will affect your whole SQL-code all over the database, so you won't have to search it

Steve:

This seems kind of like a function to me, but maybe I'm missing something. I guess you might have a section of code that would run often, but how would you handle variables? Would this be queries? Are these templates sections that are part of a query that would get dropped in?

Now that would be amazing. Imagine that you always join these three tables in some way. Well maybe not always, but more often than you'd like. You code this as a template and it gets compiled into your sproc or perhaps is even available for ad-hoc SQL. Now you want to add a fourth table or remove one of the 3. Assuming this doesn't affect your column list, changing this in one place might be much, much easier.

I'm still not sold on this one, but it seemed like it makes sense.

Version Control (from Markus E.)

Improved version and code control with automatic

difference scripts to update a database from an older version

Steve:

Markus sent this in first, but lots of people struggle with this. Why isn't there better version control? Is it because the tools always run against a live database? Why is that? People have offline SQL editors, and why couldn't I just check out before I connect to a server? If you know and there's a good reason, feel free to send me an explanation along with a virtual smack on the forehead.

I'm not sure about the differencing, but having it as an option would be nice. There are times that it would come in handy.

Conclusion

Please feel free to comment on any of these and send in more if you've got them.

Other items in this series:

Steve Jones

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Where Do I Want To Go Today? - From the Field 2