Should the developer divsion develop the tools for SQL Server
I had an interesting discussion with someone at SQLBits
about people in Microsoft and who might be in charge in 5 years time. This
person was a developer and felt that the developer side of the business would
take over the server side of the business.
This is an interesting view and one that I partly share. However the server
and developer divisions have very different targets. The biggest is the user
base. The user base of the developer division is clearly developers, to that end
the focus is on making applications easy, enjoyable and quick to develop. For
this they need good tools. Where as the server division is largely down to
getting servers installed and managed, and the aim is 1 person can manage 10s or
100s of servers.
From a cost perspective, the costs a of a server is the server, whereas the
cost of the an application is more made up of the development time, therefore
the developer division has to focus on the tools.
Added this the situation that there are, I reckon, ~ 50-100
.Net developers to a SQL developer, the developer division has to focus on
tools.
So lets look at SQL, one of the biggest teams in Microsoft. It has two roles,
develop the engine and develop the tools to manage and work with the engine.
Managing this as one has a number of obstacles. Engines need to be rock solid
and stable companies don't like change. Building and engine is not about
end user usability, whereas development is changing all the time and is all
about end user usability and productivity. I get very frustrated going to
developer sessions and seeing VS 10 etc having all these usability enhancements
like you can run all flavours of .Net in one Visual Studio, but with SQL we
are stuck with an unextensible VS shell.
So I'm interested to hear at MIX an add-in for IIS Manager the database
manager, http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/552/using-the-iis-database-manager/
I wonder if the developer division will eventually take over the SQL tools, I
doubt it. I imagine we will just end up with a mix match of tools in IIS, VS,
and SSMS
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