Buck and Dan

OK, so I went to TechED last week and had a really good time. One of the better times I had was meeting with Buck Woody and Dan Jones from the SQL Server dev team. They’re in charge of writing SSMS.

The basic problem I had with SSMS was its lack of DBA friendliness. I’ve spoken before about how MS hates DBAs because there are so many problems in the GUI and they don’t seem to be doing a thing to fix it. And that holds true now more than ever. My talk with Buck and Dan was interesting to say the least. They were snotty and condescending to say the least. So why do I say it was the best time I had while I was there then? Because I thrive in that kind of discussion. And the entire time I’m making mental notes of things to blog about. I just let them dig their holes.

So the discussion started with Buck telling me that he has been a DBA for 20yrs and he wasn’t going to let some half-wit journalist come in and tell him what to do. And Dan basically said that I need to learn SQL Server better and then maybe I’d be able to use the tools they way they were designed.

It was really the most pathetic display of chest thumping I’ve seen in a while. But it goes to prove that MS hates DBAs and they don’t care what we have to say in the least.

OK, actually that’s not what happened at all… I just wanted to give Buck and Dan (and Josh) a little heart attach. Actually, these are 2 of the coolest guys you’ll ever meet and they explained a lot of things to me about how they build the tools and the problems they face. They listened to my complaints and addressed them. And they didn’t rush. We were there for maybe 1.5-2hrs (give or take) and we didn’t leave until I was finished. It was a very fun talk and it’s something that I think everyone who complains about the tools should hear. Unfortunately I can’t remember it all, but they’ve got a lot of restrictions placed on them that they’ve got to try to get around. This is the problem when you’re selling to governments and foreign countries. The problems are stuff like this… they can’t say this because it means something else in Italian, or because France will sue them. And they can’t name a button that because the word in german is 4x longer than would fit on the screen, or they can’t make the menu like this because a blind DBA couldn’t work with it (no kidding). We actually talked about the blind DBA scenario quite a bit. So there are restrictions they face that nobody could ever imagine.

That’s really just a high-level overview because I didn’t take notes, and specifics really aren’t important anyway. But they’ve got some things worked out under the covers that will be coming probably in Katmai+1 (at least I hope), and much to my surprise, they’ve done some really cool stuff in this last version of katmai. As most of you know, katmai went RC0 last week and the difference in the GUI is like night and day. The activity monitor alone is fabulous. Though, so far in my environment it takes way too long to load any data, but we’ll see how it hammers out in the coming weeks.

But there are still plenty of things I think should be done in SSMS to make our lives easier. Things that wouldn’t break any of their governmental regulations. Things like being able to sort jobs by category, or saving filters, etc. (yes, I know that’s a sentence fragment). But in all, I like a lot of the new features in the GUI, and even though I don’t use the GUI all that much it’s nice to have them.

I got to know these guys a little in the more informal setting on the blue carpet and they’re really cool. I think given some time and enough swag from MS that we’ll become pretty decent friends.

Personally though, I think powershell is going to be the hit of Katmai… more on that later.