@Dr Dweeb

Your post is a great critique of SQL Server and I honestly stand behind you on everything you say - I must have encountered most of the things you pick out at the most inconvenient moments myself.

However, will that stop me betting my mortage (in a very real sense) on the continuing success of the Microsoft product? Not a chance. Long live the marketing dollar.

Content Free

This is a content free marketing rehash of no use to the serious practitioner.

SQLServer still has a clinically dead optimizer, aimed at trivial data base sizes. It relies blindly on the internal statistics, despite the fact that statistics collection is based on a terminally broken algorithm conceived by someone (probably decades ago) and never adjusted (and not user adjustable). SQLServer will happily decide to read 1 billion rows (or a trillion) rather than do a direct index key lookup to retrieve a trivial result set when all values required are specified in the predicate. It takes a seriously warped engineering attitude to think that this is appropriate under any circumstances.

SQLServer is also a failure with respect to adherence to standards, never mind what might be considered useful. The inability to describe complex contstraints declaritively springs to mind and the necessity to drop computed columns in order to change underlying functions is another example of what a dirt cheap implementation SQLServer actually is. Domains I hear you ask? Nope, never heard of them, and don't try using user defined types, or you will discover that they don't really work, and woe betide the poor fool who might want to alter a column so constrained.

The number of View declarations and complex select statements that cannot be correctly resolved, or simply return the wrong answer is horrifying. Nothing has improved in the SQLServer2000 to SQLServer2008sp1 timeframe in this area.

I could fill up a book with all the things that are fundamentally broken with SQLServer. However, MS is not and has rarely been interested in building a solid underlying SQL engine. They are interested in seducing incompetent journalist, fanbois and diverse lackys with an alphabet soup of this months flavoured functionality. And today I read yet another version of how successful MS are at actually getting their message out.

Now, I know that there are some great engineers in the SQLServer team, like whoever did the page compression code, which is an outstanding piece of engineering with which I have yet to find fault. But the bottom line is, that MS is still concerned with the alphabet soup, flavour of the month than core engine functionality - the stuff that makes DBA's lives somewhat tolerable is sadly left far behind. Gee, if only the basic functionality did what it says on the box. Don't get me started on replication - another disaster on wheels that MS still cannot get right. SSMS is also seriously creaky and did not improve in the last iteration - actually, now I think of it it got provably worse as they removed functionality that worked, and replaced it with functionality that didn't work. Multiple bugfixes and the issue remains - but hey, no one uses schemas do they? So why bother fixing it?

Enough of this rant. Whatever else should be obvious is that the issues raised above are probably not even on the radar of MS, the MS marketing machine, the reviewer or the rest of the SQLServer fanbois crowd, almost none of which could manage a piss-up in a brewery if the chatter on the internet by self styled gurus and experts is anything to guage by. And that fact really says everything about what MS is as a corporation and has always been.

SQLServer2008R2 is just the next iteration of more new features at the cost of actually having base functionality that actually does what it is supposed to.

Dr. Dweeb