September 1, 2020 at 12:00 am
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Evolution of Windows
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September 1, 2020 at 12:14 pm
Regarding SQL Versions and restore to older versions: the "assuming no new keywords are used" would be a bad sign for a new version.
I don't care about all the fancy stuff that is usefull only under particular circumstances (as stretch DB, where you could offload parts of a DB to the cloud.
On the other hand we still have no LEATEST() / GREATEST() function (which should be not to hard to create, since there should be not too much difference to other functions with a varying number of parameters as CONCAT()).
Yes, we finally got STRING_AGG() with 2017, but it is very limited if you need an aggregation on different levels (you have to use several subqueries). And I'd wonder if there are developers out there, that did not curse, because it is difficult to get several columns PIVOT()ed (without dirty tricks as concating / splitting the values into a long string). Okay, I may be wrong, PIVOT is not the best known feature, so some of us may not have used it...
I hope MS will put some more focus on T-SQL and help us with our daily work.
On the other hand you'll still need real version numbers, otherwise it may become hard to make code switches for functions added only in newer versions (and I doubt, that everybody would install a new feature update immediately, so you'll still need it).
Regarding the restores on older servers: as long there are no big changes to the data storage layout (e.g. after implementing ColumnStore or InMemoryTables), I see no reason, why it should not be possible to restore to an older SQL version server. Yes, some procedures / functions / views may become invalid, but this should be no show stopper. Nor should any new system tables / views / functions / columns be a problem.
God is real, unless declared integer.
September 1, 2020 at 12:26 pm
A few things in response to your editorial. I like Windows 10, too. Contrary to you, Steve, I really like Cortana. In fact, I like Cortana so much that I purchased two Harman Kardon Invokes with Cortana. I've been hurt by the fact that Microsoft has decided to drop Cortana from speakers in about a week. At least I got a few years of use out of Cortana on my Invokes.
On a separate issue, the link you posted to in your article was instantly blocked by my ad blocker.
I think you've made a good point that for Microsoft that major upgrades to SQL Server are just too lucrative for Microsoft to give those up. That will be true of Oracle, DB2, etc.
Rod
September 1, 2020 at 2:25 pm
I'm not sure the keywords item is a big issue for some cases. Lots of people might upgrade from a previous version and not change code. In that case, we would hope they could still restore back to the previous one. I think that's a common case.
For the use of functions, the db would restore, but code that called something new would be broken, though you could write your own placeholder function. In fact, that would be an interesting idea. Could we have a database scoped config that allowed user objects to override system objects for functions?
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September 2, 2020 at 3:12 pm
I'm pretty sure I've used every version of Windows since Windows 286 . I even have the 286 version install saved on 3.5" disks. The oldest version I am using now is Win XP, which still serves that machine well, and allows me to use some tools that are no longer compatible or supported. Other machines have versions 8.1 and 10.0, which all run in the traditional desktop mode and have all the crap software stripped out. My practice is to not keep anything active on my machines that I'm not using, and just install things as I need them after an upgrade.
Just this week I needed to resurrect an old Access database that I want to retrieve some data from, so that had to go on my old XP machine where I reinstalled an old Access version to recover it.
Windows may not be great, but it is way ahead of whatever is in second place.
Rick
One of the best days of my IT career was the day I told my boss if the problem was so simple he should go fix it himself.
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