Another transition…

After spending a year and a half working on “M”, I’ve decided to make another change in what I’m doing and and move over to the SQL Server Programmability team. That’s the team responsible for things like the T-SQL language and runtime in SQL Server. Working on “M” was a lot of fun and the team was great, but after spending a good, long while down in the bowels of a GLR parser, I decided that that was enough and that it was time to do something else. Working on SQL Server programmability is, in some ways, a combination of all my previous jobs-a bit of data from Access, a bit of runtime from OLE Automation, and a bit of programming language from Visual Basic and “M”. It’s also an interesting challenge-a product that’s both well established and confronting a lot of new challenges. I think it’s going to be quite a bit of fun!

It does mean saying goodbye to “M”, and that was sad (although, really, they’re still in the same division and not that far away), but that’s the way it goes. I’ll be looking forward to their next CTP, which is where people will see a lot of the hard work that’s been going on and the overall direction that the language is headed. There’s a lot of cool stuff coming, and I think people will find it very interesting!

Changing jobs also means that I’m back to drinking from the firehose, learning the ins and outs of the guts of the SQL Server engine, as well as T-SQL. Interesting stuff. Any good T-SQL/SQL Server blogs anyone can recommend?

6 thoughts on “Another transition…

  1. PaulG

    Good for you, that’s great news! VB and TSQL are my 2 favorite languages so I will look forward to you getting a chance to put some VB DNA into that SQL stack. And please keep blogging along the way – your VB blog posts have been very helpful in understanding some of the thinking behind the language features.

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  2. RichB

    Does this mean you’re the person to fix T-SQL programmability?

    Does this mean you will help add packages, integrate UDFs properly, error handling, string/date tokenization…. the list goes on.

    I sure hope so, because my current project – porting Oracle to SQL Server – is an exercise in stepping back 20 years.

    If you want to see how bad it is, take a reasonable Oracle DB with a reasonable amount of PL/SQL and try and get SQL Server Migration Assistant to port it nicely without the huge hoops it goes though before failing spectacularly.

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  3. Roger Jennings

    Hi, Paul,

    A voice from the old days of VB and Access. Welcome to SQL Server Programmability, T-SQL, OData, and the like.

    On the whole, I believe the SQL Server Programmability group, which must number in the thousands, have done a great job in the past few years.

    How are the kids doing?

    –rj

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