July 15, 2008 at 9:32 am
Steve lets take your baseball trip and change stadiums to manufacturing facilities, expand from the continental U.S. to the world. Now throw in the fact that our raw materials are available in multiple world markets. For example lets pick wool, available in quanties from the United States, Australia, and Scotland. We have plants located in Germany, England the U.S. and China which are capable of converting the wool to the finished product we are selling. Our customer has placed an order for delivery on or before a given date. The order is such that due to prior scheduling commitments we can not assign it to a single manufacturing facility. Now lets be specific about our task. We must produce the product on time and with the greatest potential profit for ourselves. We have the spacial elements of raw material availability and manufacturing facilities. Now include the cost and time of shipping both raw material and finished product. Add in available plant capacity, differing manufacturing costs at the various plants, and finally the exchange rate between the clients $$ and our $$ and arrive at a least cost (maximum profit) solution. I believe this is a real world problem that would benefit from some examples.
July 15, 2008 at 10:11 am
Several years ago, I used M$ Map program to lay out and drive a 4200 mile trip from the midwest to the east coast and back. Despite my best planning and error checking, when we went to the KitchenAid plant in Ohio, I found myself in a front of a farm house sitting in the middle of a corn field watching a county crew put gravel on the road ahead. Yep, we were on Kitchen Aid road in Ohio alright. Correct address too. We had actually passed the plant the day before in driving to this location.
So, be sure to have an error routine to handle similar address. And make sure you address time zone changes as you move along the route. Arriving late for the first pitch would not be fun.
July 15, 2008 at 10:15 am
I would like to see regex built in into t-sql rather than having to build a dll with Visual Studio.
Examples:
Find the nth occurrence of data in a string
Replacing funky data in a string
True / False Data is in a certain format
I would also like to see the ability to call multiple stored procedures from a stored procedure in a multi-threaded way. Unless that can easily be shown with a Service Broker example.
July 15, 2008 at 10:58 am
Another couple of geo-coded db ideas:
- update the genealogical databases to include locations, most packages record the names of locations but not lat/lon.
- aircraft hazards - helecopter EMS pilots (and others i am sure) want to know where things are sticking up in their space.
As I recall, there were 2 location data types. Did not read in detail which to use where.
July 15, 2008 at 11:08 am
More good ideas! Although we're not really staffed for generating large quantities of data (Live Earth is doing a lot of that for us)... we're looking for ideas for product samples and/or community projects, like SQL RSS[/url], to start and turn over to the public.
Bryan, the two new spatial types are geography and geometry. The former for geographical locations and the latter for arbitrary shapes, etc. Just FYI.
July 15, 2008 at 11:34 am
I'd like to see an example of a global business application that tracks events in multiple timezones.
For example, we have a global database, located in the USA, that (among other things) tracks work orders that are assigned to people who work in offices around the world. One goal is to determine whether the work order remains within specified service-level agreements (SLA). Although I have (mostly) solved this problem, when I saw the new date/time function DATETIMEOFFSET I had hoped it would simply the solution. Upon examination I don't think it does. To use this function you must pass it the offset. But if you know the offset you can do the same thing with DATEADD.
One SLA, for example, says that work on an order should be started within 4 business hours after it is submitted. Naturally, an order can be submitted outside of local business hours. Other SLAs are measured in business days and the event that triggers the beginning of the period can again occur at any time. Tables to record work hours, holidays, timezone, etc for each office are obviously required. The effect of daylight savings time must also be considered.
July 15, 2008 at 11:39 am
..."the two new spatial types are geography and geometry. The former for geographical locations and the latter for arbitrary shapes, etc. Just FYI."
Arbitrary shapes like political boundaries? I am a library trustee for a smalllll library district - that could be an interesting mash-up - geo-coded census data and political boundaries. I know that our boundaries do not align with all functions that serve our population. And, I know that libraries have "un-served" populations. To translate from "north of the oak tree and west of no-name creek".
thx
bryan
July 15, 2008 at 12:13 pm
For me I want to see some good SERVICE BROKER examples. Some good monitoring tools for service broker would be appreciated.
Please M$ smarten up the error messages in SQL. For example, we have email alerts when replication has a problem. Would it really be that much of a challenge to include the sequence number and commandid in the message.
The new spatial datatypes seem a bit tacked on i.e. they appear to be a .NET CLR assembly with the heavy maths farmed out to another DLL.
I would like something that says "don't use feature 'x' in this situation". I've been playing with the spatial geography and have found that for simple shapes their overhead is simply too great. For example, if you inflate a geographic point to represent a catchment area then you might as well have
WHERE G.Latitude BETWEEN @MinLatitude AND @MaxLatitude
AND G.Longitude BETWEEN @MinLongitude AND @MaxLongitude
Where the geography types refer to a more complex shape, such as a catchment area that takes into account the distorting affect of major roads, rivers, inconvenient lakes and mountains then they become invaluable.
The explanation of the geospatial indexes could do with some clarity.
The indexes represent 4 grids split into cells. A cell in level 1 contains the grid for level 2, and a cell in level 2 contains the grid for level 3.
You can say whether the number of cells in a particular gride level are LOW (4 cells), MEDIUM (16 cells) or HIGH (256 cells).
But what area does the top level of the grid represent? Is it the entire earth?
Speaking to ORACLE DBAs the one aspect of SQL Server they offer grudging respect for is the tools that come with SQL. At some point they will add the rider that the tools "are not as good as TOAD".
Anything that explains the more advanced security features would go down well.
Including the visual studio templates for writing CLR functions in the SQL Server version of visual studio would help.
Again, explaining when not to use CLR would be good.
SQL Profiler templates are good but why doesn't the performance tuning one have all of cpu, duration, reads, writes in it.
July 15, 2008 at 12:20 pm
Arbitrary shapes like political boundaries? I am a library trustee for a smalllll library district - that could be an interesting mash-up - geo-coded census data and political boundaries. I know that our boundaries do not align with all functions that serve our population. And, I know that libraries have "un-served" populations. To translate from "north of the oak tree and west of no-name creek".
Here's the breakdown of intended use by type:
* Use the new geography data type to store geodetic spatial data and perform operations on it
* Use the new geometry data type to store planar spatial data and perform operations on it
See also Spatial Data (url).
Even for your example, I think you're going to want to use geography, especially if you're mapping it along with other more traditional geo data.
July 15, 2008 at 12:35 pm
David.Poole (7/15/2008)
Please M$ smarten up the error messages in SQL. For example, we have email alerts when replication has a problem. Would it really be that much of a challenge to include the sequence number and commandid in the message.
"Fixing" error messages is consistently the #1 ask of SQLBU. We're aware of it across the box and I'll pass along the feedback. That said, the #2 ask of us is my jurisdiction: samples and community development. I appreciate the input! Thank you.
The spatial types and hierarchyid aren't "tacked on"; there were a lot of engine improvements added to make them work. They are CLR types, though, and the CLR UDTs that you write benefit from the work done to support our own types written with the extensibility framework (SQL CLR) that we put into Yukon. Ed and Isaac are constantly soliciting input for vNext which is being planned as we 'speak.' I'll make sure that they (and the UE writers) get your input.
I'm pretty sure the performance tuning templates have the events in them that MPU and PSS have consistently found to be the most useful defaults for troubleshooting queries that you know are already slow... but when I was a field consultant, I always used my own custom trace definitions that were more of a Swiss Army™ knife than any default could be.
As with any other change that you'd like to see in the SQL Server product, please post them to Connect (url)!!
July 15, 2008 at 2:26 pm
I hope you don't think I was referring to SQLSvr when I used the term "tacked on" in an earlier post. I was referring to the way SQL, or any other DB, had to deal with spatial data usually as BLOBs, which is not as efficient as a dedicated solution like a geography data type. The early days of SDE were rough. The DB vendor community has been moving greatly toward supporting spatial data types in the past decade, and the GIS community is thankful.
July 15, 2008 at 3:36 pm
maloneyk (7/15/2008)
I hope you don't think I was referring to SQLSvr when I used the term "tacked on" in an earlier post.
No offense taken. Because I ran a development shop for a real estate startup for ~6 years, I have a lot of sympathy for the GIS history... It's come a long way toward mainstream, but it's not quite there yet. SQL Server 2008 will do it's fair share toward making it ubiquitous and giving people the tools to use it more.
There are a lot of folks who don't like the fact that many of our new types are "not native types" because apparently they feel like CLR is a second-class citizen in SQL Server. Notwithstanding the fact that you MUST have .NET 3.5 SP1 installed even to run setup for SQL Server 2008 or that we've shipped three major new types using CLR extensibility. [It's a little known fact that you can't really turn off SQL CLR... Like Service Broker, if the engine needs CLR for something internal, it's going to use it whether or not it's enabled for user databases.]
If I were a betting man, I'd be putting money on seeing MORE things in SQL Server vNext done in CLR, not fewer. Witness SQL PowerShell, which will probably become the preferred scripting/automation technology over the next couple of releases. Case in point, I've met more than one developer who wants the chance to rewrite the engine in all managed code (which won't happen any time soon), but I digress.
There are a few aspects of our new spatial types which aren't optimal for some corner cases, but that will improve over time, as will the documentation and samples from the spatial team. Microsoft is committed to delivering more and better in the spatial arena on all fronts. (The Geopolitical Intelligence and Policy Questions group is probably getting tired of my incessant questions.)
:w00t:
July 15, 2008 at 3:40 pm
Wayne Stauffer (7/15/2008)
I'd like to see an example of a global business application that tracks events in multiple timezones.
You've got a tough nut to crack there, Wayne. But it's a more and more common nut. I like the idea and I'll definitely put it on the list! Since you've got a lot of time under the gun on this, and if you're interested in working on a community project for solving this problem, shoot me a private message and we'll see what we can get started.
July 16, 2008 at 2:31 am
Steve
I'm interested in the Spatial side as we are currently developing an application for a UK forestry company. Mapping is very important to the forestry industry as this is how they know where to cut timber, access roads, hazards, etc. At the moment most of this is done through a couple of GIS (Geographical Information System) applications but these do not hold all the information that the two new 2008 data types appear to offer.
Due to the delays in SQL 2008 we have had to use SQL 2005 at present, but there is a field for Grid Co-ordinates ready to go!
Kind Regards
Ian Logan
Ian Logan
straker.com
July 16, 2008 at 7:52 am
How about something like the new gps chip that's in a climber jacket for the folks fighting wildfires. Synch that up to a real time satellite and when a firefighter calls for water, relief or rescue have the tempretures and the location sent directly to the ground or air crew of the firefighter. We lose some every year and this is a way Microsoft could deliver some life saving source code from the community at large. The same technology could be used for people lost at sea.
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