Yukon Developer session

Went down to Yukon developer session organised by microsoft uk. couple of nice presentations... it so good to be at a developers session rather than one of those sales pitches.

It was interesting to see actually managed code within inproc hosted CLR with yukon. A sort of mix and match of managed code with TSQL. TSQL is still the fastest thing when it comes to relational data. Managed code within Yukon is more for computational intensive task.. conditional.. loops.. string manipulation etc. Saw a brief overview of data.sqlserver namespace overview.. the classes and how they can be used. Use of partial classes and user defined functions. More on it here.

We can even have managed UDTs. the only requirements are that they should take a string as contructor and should implement a method called Parse.

TSQL has a good set of enhancements... stuff like DDL triggers (oh yes on create, alter, delete etc).. use of common data expressions... reminded me of subqueries and how we used to name a resultset... similar in broad terms but CTEs can be used throughout the context of the current query.. not just current TSQL query within a block. they have added things like Try and Catch blocks.. though as the program manager put it.. they keep changing their minds on the exact syntax :)... and absolutely thrilled by Rank and Rownum etc.

The day ended with Analysis server enhancements and DTS.. Me and a friend Leon were talking about what the heck ETL was... i reckoned it was more like eXtensible Transformation Language... not even close... rather it stands for Extract, Transform and Load. More on ETL here

some links refer to beta 1 documentation.. unfortunately.. you will need to check the books online for that. That not all... the next version of MSDE.. its called SQL Express now and its still free is available for download ... you can also get you hands on books online.. check this page