Joe's Blog

Three things I like about SQL Server 2005

There are three things that I seemed to have liked with the new SQL Server 2005.

XML Support

It's at the level mapping XML documents with relational tables. It treats XML as a fundamental data type and hence can be indexed. There is also support of XQuery, that is another great feature. Well, it also uses XML as a means of notifications. Other than the TDS Tabular Data Stream support it now supports HTTP SOAP which would mean we can skip IIS and directly get data from the database by using HTTP.

CLR Support

The CLR support means that Store Procs can be now written in C# or VB.NET. Store procs can be written in both TSQL or in .NET. But data intensive task still TSQL is the best bet. .NET could be used for some complex processing say data access across remote servers that would need to manipulated before usage. Here a word of caution would effective use of TSQL or .NET since developers could end with a common refactoring problem of the "Golden Hammer"

Service broker

This is an interesting feature that I seemed to like. This like a messaging system within SQL Server. It has queues which are transactional and messages to be processed can be sent directly to it and the messages are processed appropriately. Because it's within the same system it does not need a two phase commits for the transaction and this itself is a performance gain. For example if you have some data that need to be transferred over to another database asynchronously then this a process to use. This is also extremely reliable and would tend to collect the messages even if the backend server were to fail. Developers would need to design and create a system that effectively uses it to gain fully from the benefits of service broker.

posted by Joseph Poozhikunnel @ 3:46 PM