Microsoft Roadshow - Part I

This Wednesday, I happened to attend the Microsoft Roadshow in Lahore. Event was good, well organized and had a lot of MS touch :)

First session was about the buzz-word: Security. I played TicTacToe with my peer throughout the session, a lot of the security being discussed was a network-admin sort of thing.

Second session: Yup! Impressive. SQL Server 2005 Rocks!

They have got a lot of things added. Yukon, codename for SQL Server 2005, supports User Defined Types. Develop a class of your own in .NET say with the name "Employee", deploy it as User Defined Type, and Boom! You can add a column of type "Employee" to your SQL Server Table. Cool! Isn't it?

Thought sometime, that if you could have some instrumentation added to your Stored Procedures (SP onwards), the life would have been somewhat easier. But writing to local file system from within a SP, ahem ahem ... ! Well now you can! You can develop your SPs in
any of the .NET languages, publish it as SP, and again BOOM!, you have got your assembly listed in SQL Server 2005, under the node, "Stored Procedures", you can call it from any other pure SQL SP. And yes you can publish your SQL SPs as Web Service! No DB connection needed, just add a web-reference to your project and Enjoy!

The next big thing in Yukon is support for XML Documents. You can now define a column, in a table, of type XML, and that column will be able to accommodate a complete XML Doc. You can event insert XML through T-SQL inline, like: INSERT INTO Table1 VALUES('some-valid-xml'). You can even provide a schema while defining the column, so that each time somebody inserts XML into the column, SQL Server would be able to validate it against the schema. Appreciated!

You can query the XML Doc stored in SQL Server, with XPath/XQuery, so that you can get to some individual attribute.

Yes! You are right. The Performance???? Is still a question.