JayBaz offers one of the best biking thoughts I've read so far this riding season...
Motorcycle helmets are pretty expensive, but they're cheaper than a new brain.
Philip Reick gets it right again: we can't just demand features and expect to be successful. The best justification for a feature needs to be build on a business case. After all, how many of you make the same demands of your customers before you going about developing a solutuion for them?
Another question Matt asked was...
Where does XQuery go if it just queries XML Data?
I felt so much better with that question than I did the MSDE one! One of the biggest misconceptions I keep running into is that XQuery is an query over XML Infosets. Yes, true, one of XQuery's major strengths is exactly that. But the other strength -- the one I'm really excitied about -- is using XQuery to fabricate XML Infosets over a relational data store like SQL Server. It works by extending the XQuery language to map columns from data sources into the query results. Michael Rys covers that here and here.
Personally, I really hope other database vendors follow suit here. The Noble Good of SQL as a universal query language is the cause. Yes, I know, there were plenty of good reasons to make different versions of SQL do different things on different platforms. I hope XQuery won't fragment that way -- I'd love to have one XQuery language that works agnostic of the underlying product. XQuery, I think, has that potential. Its up to all of us to keep that dream alive though. The idea of being able to pass a query to a service and have it "just work" is deeply appealing.
Now I hear the snipping already "Oh great, here Microsoft goes again, stealing and corrupting a standard..." That's not happening here. I believe that Microsoft is just ahead of the curve and their representatives to the W3C are working with the other parties participating in the standard on this database query integration topic. Let's give them time to see how that goes before taking pot shots at them, please.
The question came up if there were any good Open Source Databases (like MySQL) that would support XQuery in this way. I'm aware of this list of products on the W3C site, but if anybody has recommendations about products we should be kicking the tires on, please let me know.
Matt Payne and I had lunch today to start talking about where we're going to go with our joint presentation. He asked a ton of really good questions and I thought it would make sense to answer them here. First questions first:
How do I get started learning SQL Server if I don't have a SQL Server to learn against?
In this case, it wasn't a case of Matt not having the host for it, it was a licensing question.
There's a couple of ways to go about this:
If the need is strictly short term and you don't mind potentially throwing away the OS install at some point, you can download a full trial version of SQL Server from here.
If you need more time than the trial period offers, I suggest:
In either case, I strongly recommending installing Service Pack 3A and downloading and using the SQL Server Best Practices Analyzer to fine tune your configuration. Not being a bit shy, I'd also recommending getting yourself a copy of this book from Apress.