November 21, 2013 at 10:55 am
Robert.Sterbal (11/21/2013)
I tend to rely on google and experience, as well as one on one interaction to address the issue that you raised here. It is the nature of the form of documentation that it is a bad place to put what the limitations are. Makes it too easy for competitors to attack your business.
But everyone has limitations, and the fact that some features don't work for some situations isn't a place to attack things. I'm sure competitors would attack, but it would be a shallow, straw man attack. I suspect that most developers would look past such silliness.
November 21, 2013 at 11:14 am
What is SQL server not good at? SSIS (sorry, I know that is too general)
At least there should be documentation and warnings about the import issues that have persisted through various versions of the product and that MS is unlikely to fix or patch. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has spent hours or days researching an error message only to find out that the issue is a documented bug (but usually on a non-MS site like this one.)
So really my answer is MS is not good at honesty about known issues. There should be a central repository to list known issues and suggested work-arounds.
November 21, 2013 at 11:26 am
Luis Cazares (11/21/2013)
Even if it's included in BOL, would people read the warnings?Most people having bad coding habits won't even read basic documentation and go for what they suppose is better with no real bases.
Some of us would for sure.
November 21, 2013 at 12:17 pm
Whatever problems open source software has, per unit/device/client licensing is very costly to scale.
November 21, 2013 at 2:31 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (11/21/2013)
Jeff Moden (11/20/2013)
The article link in the post above doesn't work. It takes me to a "Not found" window.Do you mean the URL to the editorial? Or the one to the article I referenced? Both work for me. They're here:
Editorial: http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/104983/
Article: http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never-use-mongodb/
It was in the original post of this thread. I must have caught it right while you were setting it up because it works fine now.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
November 22, 2013 at 1:43 am
Depends what you regard as SQL Server.
1. The relational engine
2. The column store engine
3. SS IS/AS/RS
4. Full-text search
For me full-text search is disappointing. That is why people suck data out into Apache SOLR.
Having used Ab Initio I can say that SSIS isn't brilliant.
The question I have is whether you think SS IS/RS should be open-sourced?
For what you get the costs aren't as bad as they are made out to be. Open source is great on the community editions but you quickly reach the point where what you actually need is the Enterprise Edition in which case the costs are comparable and you have to factor in the additional effort to integrate everything.
November 22, 2013 at 2:24 am
What is SQL Server not good at?
Defining constraints declaratively.
The CREATE ASSERTION statement has been in the SQL standard since 1992. Microsoft still haven't implemented it.
If you have a constraint that states "a department must not have more than its maximum number of employees" you currently have to write triggers on two different tables to achieve this.
With CREATE ASSERTION this constraint can be achieved with a single SQL expression.
As none of the other major SQL-DBMS vendors have implemented assertions, this would give Microsoft a major selling point.
November 22, 2013 at 10:06 am
Absolutely. Over the last few years, it's one of the first questions I ask vendors about their products. To me it's similar to knowing when not to use my hammer for a given home improvement scenario. Salespeople will talk all day about how wonderful their product is, but if they can't tell me any of its weaknesses then I'm a little suspicious.
November 24, 2013 at 9:52 am
There are a few failings that I find irritating:-
The inability to represent domain constraints directly. If I have some domain that is used in many coulumns and in many tables, I want to be able to declare that domain, name it, use the name in each of teh plances I want that domain. But I have to use a check constraint to define the domain instead, which means writing a constraint once for each place I use that domain.
The inability to handle general regular expressions, instead of the silly wildcard stuff for strings - and that compounts the domain issue.
All sorts of other things, but as it's an SQL based system I can't really ask for it to support the relational model, can I (eg why isn't there a symmetric difference operator).
Where is support for the latest floating point standard?
Where is support for the error management capabilities of the old floating point tandard that it claims to support?
I could probably go on,and make a longer list, but it wouldn't be useful.
On community comments, I think MS will happily publish them if they point out real issues; they don't seem to do much vetting of community comments, or pay much attention to them. I guess they might take notice and suppress something if it were illegal or thoroughly immoral or just an anti-microsoft rant rather than anything useful. But I've seen some quite idiotic comments that were allowed to stand, and also some quite anti-microsoft ones that raised real issues but in a pretty offensive manner, which suggests they are not excessively sensitive about what we add to their BOL pages.
As a general
Tom
November 24, 2013 at 7:08 pm
ccd3000 (11/22/2013)
Absolutely. Over the last few years, it's one of the first questions I ask vendors about their products. To me it's similar to knowing when not to use my hammer for a given home improvement scenario. Salespeople will talk all day about how wonderful their product is, but if they can't tell me any of its weaknesses then I'm a little suspicious.
Oddly enough, I feel the same way about the T-SQL "hammer" that I use all day every day.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
November 25, 2013 at 2:32 am
@L' Eomot Inversé
support the relational model
Yes, that is something that SQL Server doesn't do well.
However the competitors are no better on this front.
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