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My point was that the context of this article is important. SQL Server has its place, and it does what its meant to fairly well. I really just despise these gia
by endersshadow 14y ago
My point was that the context of this article is important. SQL Server has its place, and it does what its meant to fairly well. I really just despise these giant sweeping statements without context, so I wanted to add context. I also imagine that many HN readers are probably not very well versed on SQL Server. After all, it's not free (well, BizSpark makes it free for a while), and it's rarely used outside of the enterprise (for good reason).
To answer your questions, SSRS pre-2012 didn't work for non-IE users. In 2012, it works like a charm, though. As for debugging in SSIS, if you're talking about script tasks, again, they fixed it in 2012. Debugging data flows is pretty easy, too--I've never really had a trouble except for the script tasks.
As with any Microsoft product, there are a plethora of quirks that you just have to know about (or a quick googling will tell you), but I've never felt my dev time was stunted because I was using SSIS instead of Informatica or Talend or something else. These things all have their quirks, so none really bother me over the next.
Anyway, I'm not here to fly the banner of SQL Server. Microsoft, sadly, doesn't pay me royalties. I use it, it's a decent tool that does what I need it to do, but I do work on too many different platforms to really care about one or the other. My point was to give context and other info about what SQL Server is.
It's a good list for web apps, though. Certainly things you want to think about when building a web application. Especially pessimistic concurrency. I think a lot of web devs have no clue what concurrency models are. I cannot tell you the amount of `with (nolock)` arguments I've seen over the years.
- dev360 14y agowith (nolock) is amazing. I worked at a very large fortune 500 company where that was the company policy because if you removed nolock, the thread contention would grind the servers to a halt. This also lead to some really interesting bugs, like a 5 million dollar order not flowing through a system because the row wasn't in the result set.
- hp50g 14y agoWe had to throw nolock into a few things but to be honest, they should have been solved by better architecture and stopping the DB engine doing everything including app logic.
- ucee054 14y agoOut of interest, how would you do OLAP on Postgres? (MSSQL comes bundled with an OLAP server...)
- sendob 14y agohttp://mondrian.pentaho.com/ http://mondrian.pentaho.com/ Is one I have used in the past
- ucee054 14y agoI thought Mondrian doesn't do OLAP cubes, it fakes them by just converting the OLAP queries into SQL queries and hitting the database with SQL directly? Am I mistaken?
- pdpi 14y agoThat's correct. You just have an abstraction layer that represents the cube as a specific star schema on a vanilla SQL database. Other than the way you load data in, what's the difference, though? It's just an implementation detail.
- ucee054 14y agoSpeed. You can periodically build a read-only cube that has pre-computed answers to any number that any pivot-table could read from that star schema. Then, when the multinational supermarket CEO queries for his company's total profit by product line over the past five years, he gets an instant answer. The other way, the CEO must wait for weeks to get that answer from the RDBMS - or the cube must be replicated the cube inside the RDBMS somehow using tons of materialized views.
- endersshadow 14y agoFor my money, there's no better multidimensional database I've used for operational analytics than SSAS. JasperSoft, Pentaho, Essbase, Cognos, etc all just don't cut it. Essbase if you're doing GL (SSAS doesn't aggregate Parent-Child very well), but SSAS is an incredibly powerful tool. You can use Postgres with it, so you don't need SQL Server RDBMS to go with it, and you can just pay the license for your SSAS server (which needs more memory than CPU, anyway).