Awhile back I wrote that I thought some of the lesser used features of SQL Server, CLR and others, aren't widely used because so many people don't have a good frame of reference or a feeling for when they would improve a solution or situation. I also made a few suggestions to people at Microsoft that not only should they have a good number of sample situations for a feature, but that they should build some applications as well.

I have a few friends at Microsoft and recently one of them asked for few good reference applications that would be good to release for people to use and better understand how various features work. The aim is obviously to help boost a case for new SQL Server 2008 features, but there are also things that would make sense in a SQL Server 2005 or even older versions.

I had a few, but I wanted to put out a call for the rest of the community and see if you had any ideas about what types of application you'd like to see as samples, which would help you better understand features or view how they might be used. I've included one of mine below, but I'd be curious to see what the rest of you thought.

I attended a spatial talk a few months ago from some of the developers working on the SQL Server 2008 implementation and I was struck by how many places that this feature could be used. Up until that point, I'd seen a basic map demo shown over and over, something that's interesting, but not of great value to many of us. However I thought it might be expanded to include a few other features that could spark imaginations.

One of my goals is to take a few months off at some point and visit every baseball stadium in the US during one season. At 32 teams, it's not an unreasonable goal, and I thought it would make a great road trip for 3-4 months. My plan was to sit down and manually plan out a route, but I thought that this might make an interesting application.

What if every baseball stadium (or football, basketball, etc) was stored in a spatial database. Various meta data, images, etc, could be added there as well. These could be easily mapped, and even routes placed between the various stadiums for shortest distance, etc. Now we could add schedules, and then get a route that would match up with schedules. That might provide an interesting T-SQL use, or even CLR assemblies to perform some calculations.

Add in ticket prices or preferred ranges, mpg for your car, even web services to check for availability of services and this might be a very interesting reference application. I'm not sure how many people would pay for something since most people never visit more than one stadium, but it might make a great application that some of us could review and maybe even borrow code from. I'm sure the scheduling part would be very useful in all sorts of applications.

So do you have an application that you think might be interesting to DBAs and developers? That might teach them something? Add your idea to the discussion below.

Steve Jones

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