The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
Questions of Critical Importance
Tonight’s episode was a fun topic where I essentially gave a survey but without collecting responses. Because that’s how I roll. Here were the questions (including a couple I didn’t ask), along with my original answers.
- Best Named SQL feature: Hekaton was, at least until marketing got in the way and made it In-Memory OLTP.
- Worst Named SQL feature: The timestamp data type. As a runner-up, Azure Data Studio.
- SQL Feature Most Likely To Have Been Named By Marketing: Always On Availability Groups. Or maybe AlwaysOn. I think it might have been Always-On at one point as well, but don’t recall.
- Most Accurately Named SQL Feature: I want jokingly to say “Priority boost” here. On the plus side, most features are named clearly enough, even if sometimes they take away nice names and give them marketing-heavy names.
- Least Accurately Named SQL Feature: The timestamp data type. As a runner-up, Azure Data Studio.
- SQL Feature That Should Throw A Hard 24 Error If You Try to Use It In A New Project (But Continue To Work For All Your Existing Crap): Non-schemabound table-valued functions
- SQL Feature That Just Needs A Little Love to Be Great: If this was 2010, I would have said Service Broker. Right now, PolyBase.
- SQL Feature That Can Never Be Great Even With Barry White Levels of Love: CLR strict security.
- Best SQL Feature: Metadata is also described in terms of SQL.
- Suckiest SQL Feature: Stretch DB is too easy. CLR strict security could be on here, but I’ll pick something different: SSIS scale-out. It’s a half-hearted attempt to say that SSIS scales.
- Surprisingly Useful SQL Feature: Batch mode processing. To clarify, the surprising part is just how often batch mode processing can speed things up.
- Surprisingly Useless SQL Feature: Temporal tables. I think they tried to solve two problems at once and ended up providing a halfway-viable solution to each, but not a complete solution to either. A bit of that Barry White love could fix this.
- SQL Feature I’ll Probably Never Use But I Like That It Exists: Query Store plan forcing for cursors. It’s easy to dunk on cursors and performance, but I appreciate that they were able to figure this out.