‘Twas the Week Before Christmas…
And all across the world, Solid Quality Mentors was stirring with ideas for the New Year. With 2009 quickly drawing to a close, a few of our Mentors share their holiday wish lists in hope for a brighter technology future for you and yours. Follow us this holiday season on Twitter at @solidq, and add your own wish lists using the #solidq hashtag!
More Complete Window Calculations Support, Please
My holiday wish this year is to see more complete support for window calculations in T-SQL. Window calculations are calculations applied to a window of rows. You define the window using the OVER clause. SQL Server 2005 introduced only partial support for window calculations, and SQL Server 2008 added nothing in this area (see the details here). There are still lots of aspects of window calculations in standard SQL that are missing in SQL Server. Implementing those would be a great gift, helping provide simpler and more efficient solutions to many T-SQL querying problems.
—Itzik Ben-Gan
If I Promise to Be Good...
Dear Santa,
If I promise to be good next year, will you promise to give me DDL statements for configuring all new features instead of system stored procedures? And for a present, server-side compiles for SQLCLR would be a great thing to find under the tree.
Regards,
Greg Low
Giving BI Wings
An angel came to me
And asked me what could be
I thought BI
Could really fly
If SharePoint was the key
—Mark Tabladillo, 2009
A Simple Request, or Three
Dear Santa,
What I want for Christmas is a real thin-client BI tool from Microsoft! I don’t want Excel Services or PerformancePoint… They have their place, but they only work in SharePoint.
Oh, and I also want a second thing—it’s actually a “don’t want.” I don’t want Microsoft to buy any more BI tools and then turn them into dust (like Data Analyzer or Proclarity).
OK, just one more thing. When you and Rudolf stop by the Microsoft campus, can you talk to the folks there about what real self-service BI is? How about saving views in PerformancePoint? I mean, how hard can it be? How about de-coupling PerformancePoint from MOSS for the OEMs of the world!?
That’s all Santa! I think it’s a really simple request, or three.
Erik Veerman
Save the Mice
Dear Santa,
My Christmas wish is simple: Could we have all dialogs associated with SQL Server, Analysis Services, Reporting Service, and Integration Services have the most common option selected as a default instead of the most obscure? That would probably save me 3,000 mouse clicks a year.
Thanks, and enjoy the cookies,
Tom Huguelet
Thanks for the iPhone, and …
Dear Santa,
I love my brand-new, smokin’-hot iPhone! It’s the coolest thing I’ve ever owned. I sure wish Microsoft made something as nice. I promise to switch back to a Windows Mobile device once Microsoft catches up. Until then, can your elves please port SQL Server to the iPhone? I’ve been nice all year long. Honest.
Thanks, Santa!
Brian Moran
New SharePoint Feature in Your Sleigh?
Dear Santa Claus,
Could you possibly fit in your sleigh a new facility in SharePoint (possibly a GUI?) through which I could define a Web application database that respects SQL Server best practices? I would like to define the size, the location, and the filegroups of any database I would manage.
Thanks, and have a safe trip around the world,
Gilberto Zampatti
A Recovery for All and to All a Good Night!
My holiday wish is for technology to keep contributing to the recovery from the global economic recession. I wish for a recovery of the many, and not only of the privileged. And I’d like to see Solid Quality’s Mentors continue to commit themselves to helping as many people as possible join the recovery by empowering organizations to be more productive, by helping professionals increase their knowledge and improve their skills, and by helping those who lost their jobs during this recession to find new careers by becoming proficient knowledge workers and IT professionals.
I’d also like:
· My computer and my applications to recognize me when I am at my desk, without needing to enter my password a thousand times a day
· People to look at my shared calendar before calling me on the phone to find out where I might be instead of waking me at 4am
· Developers to recognize that professional data management is not something that happens magically behind the scenes. Am I dreaming?
Sincerely,
Fernando G. Guerrero