I mean me, not you. I've been accepted to present at PASS. I'm jazzed and totally freaked at the same time. I put in two abstracts, one based on my book, "Dissecting SQL Server Execution Plans" and the other based on an article I wrote published at SQL Server Central, "Deploying with DBPro to Multiple Environments." Why then am I freaked? I've spent a year delving into execution plans. I won't say I'm an expert, but I'm comfortable. I've been using DBPro for two years now, but I'm hardly eating and breathing it on a daily basis. Well, I wasn't. From this point forward I'll be neck deep in it daily. Watch for posts on this topic.
Object Relational Mapping (ORM) software is a great idea. You can't deny that the mismatch between objects and relational data has to be dealt with. Instead of all the time, money and effort being spent here, why not get a tool that does most of the work for you? But... One direction that this can lead is towards dumb databases. After all, if putting a piece of software between the object & the db makes things easier, how much easier if the db and the object look exactly the same. Ta-da! Even less code to write & maintain. Unfortunately, TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch) still applies. What you save in initial coding you will pay for in reporting, data cleanup, integrity issues, data integration issues...…
The dev teams that we support have long believed that if only they had an infinite number of environments then the deployment and integration issues that they, and we, wrestle with would go away. Never mind pointing out that if you have problems integrating then spreading yourself on to even more servers with even more isolation of individual development teams would only radically increase the problem. I tried that. I was shut down. Anyway, we had been using a tool set from one of the heavy hitter virtual environment companies. Supposedly it was going to make it possible for us to implement as many virtual environments, not just servers, but sets of servers, as we wanted. Months of work have gone by. I just got the word through back channels...…
I have no intention of this becoming "tool of the day" or anything, but I can't help tooting the horn for a tool that I've been using a lot from RedGate. It's new and in beta right now, but it's going to be pretty good. It's a data generation tool called, are you ready, Sql Data Generator. Who saw that coming? Ok. I know. I'm not funny. Anyway, this is a great little tool. I've been using it to quickly slap large amounts of data into small sets of tables to test queries that I'm writing or for checking answers that I'm posting over at SQL Server Central. The tool lets you pick which tables and the columns inside those tables that you want filled with data. It has a…