The SQL developer gap (Warning: rant coming up)

I agree with you completely, Jamie.

Unfortunately, it seems that I have to draw the conclusion that the further a product is away from the "front lines", the less love it gets.  In most cases, the "front line" is the mainstream consumer.  In the "geek" realm, it's developers.  The "front line" also usually corresponds to what carries a price tag - in our case, it's SQL Server, with RS, AS, and IS being "free" addons.  Even within those three, it seems clear that whomever is closest to the knowledge worker gets the resources.

IMO, the parts that are behind the front lines provide equal value - the platforms on which snazzy "killer i-app" whizbangs are constructed.  MSFT should know that price != value...

A second vote here - one of my biggest bugbears with SSIS is the sometimes shoddy (cough Pivot cough) and inconsistent interface.

But as Todd notes, this is back end stuff  - that only smart people tend to get anywhere near. The user interface clearly goes SSRS > SSAS > SSIS, i.e. in general order of usage / capability required to use. Coders get prettier tools simply because there are more of them.

But compared to other major vendors tools, we do still have it good, and the SSIS team have indicated the next release will be getting some UI love.

So ... could be worse...  no excuse to let up though :)

Completely agree, Jamie.  While we're lucky to be where we are, there is at the same time enough room for improvement everywhere you look in the entire SQL Server "BI Stack". I was just about to blog (again) on an SSIS beatdown that we don't think about but just accept;  the products are still very much in their infancy IMHO.

Lee

Agree with every word written here.

On a positive note yes SQL is better in terms of UI as compared to other DBs. How ever when comparing IS, RS or AS with other MS products one does feel the difference. A lot needs to be done especially providing some meaningful error messages.

I also absolutely agree here.

I understand that there were more important things on the wish list for Microsoft since SQL 2005 has been released but I really hope they will improve this in the near future!

I often wonder if they aren't merely box ticking exercises for MS to be able to claim improved competetiveness with other vendors.  "Look it does _this_!"

Why else would they so fundamentally change them every time they do a release?  Just get used to dmo, then bang off it goes. DTS - nope away. They should make AS, SSIS and RS seperate standalone products which you could get as part of a bundle.  That way they might make some small effort at least.

You hit the nail on the head.

As a data guy I never really knew of all the help my .net colleagues had. But I'm aware of the issues you mentioned with BIDS.

I've recently been using some of the Informatica toolset (Powercenter and B2B Data Exchange) and have been massively frustrated at how these tools work. There is virtually no help on the internet, help is only available through expensive training courses, local help files only hint at possible solutions, etc. I think it's so important to have stable, consistent, productive dev tool at hand with extensive help available from the internet.

Here's hoping that Microsoft will put some more effort into the UI of future SQL Server releases.

Hi Jamie,

 The accumulation of those things is what prevents me to "sell" SSIS to our internal team, we do A LOT of ETL in our system, but because of so many inconsistencies and lack of an advanced scripting/programming IDE, we are much more productive rolling our own C# + SProcs solution to load/transform the data.

What you forgot to mention though is that the price of SQL Server is going up. That's the rub. That, and who knows what the final interplay between R2 and VS2010 will be... but it's likely to be 'bumpy' if the past is any indicator.

"Am I the only SQL guy that feels like a second class citizen in the Microsoft developer ecosystem?"

Excellent points!!!! The error messages in particular that I get from SQL Server in general have been extremely misleading and wasteful. That's been my pet peeve. We've been evaluating ETL (Extraction Transformation Loading)solutions too and top of the list has been SSIS. I wonder if there are some better tools out there though that are still compatible with SQL Server?

On another note MS Connect is a usability nightmare!!!!! It was extremely confusing just trying to figure out something as simple as just where you should go to even report a bug!!! I'm so glad I read this post because now I finally have an idea how to report the many crashes that I've had to endure from Visual Studio. Argh!!! The software is great except when its not so great. :-)

Great post Jamie, as a developer I couldn't agree more!

Here's another one for the list:

o a query window in the SSIS OLE DB Source (and some other components) which makes you wish that you had a magnifying glass next to your keyboard (at least on screens with a high resolution).

"Is it a dot? Ow, it's a comma. And what is that vague thing, ow, a double-quote..."

The following string gives a nice example: '"hf"' - on my screen it looks as if the letters are surrounded with just some vague double quotes.

Luckily we've got SSMS to write our queries, it's such a blessing nowadays!

Regards,

Valentino

Keep fighting the battle!

Who knows, they might at least let us "undo" on the next version.

SSIS is a product that would be great, but seems to have around 2/3 the effort expended on it, that it needed to be a professional product.  Lots of good ideas, but it's such a buggy, badly written mess still, that I can't imagine it ever being cost-effective.