Ajarn Mark Caldwell Blog

Reading through the DBA Overview of Yukon whitepaper that Graz mentions in his blog, there were a few items that really jumped out at me.  Here are a few thoughts:

• Dedicated Administrator Connection:  Sounds like a cool feature, always allowing a sysadmin to connect even to a "hung" server.  But you'd better really lockdown those sysadmin logins tight.
• Recursive Queries:  May be a blessing for people designing hierarchical systems.  May also be a horrid curse.  I can see this leading to a nasty infinite loop with one little slip.  Looking forward to an article by Rob some day...
• PIVOT and UNPIVOT:  I'm liking this one.  Hopefully it will be as useful as I imagine.  But unfortunately, it will make another of Rob's articles obsolete.  I have done some really cool things in Excel using pivot tables that query directly out of the SQL Server, and now perhaps that will be even easier or more efficient.  BTW, if you've never used Excel pivot tables, check them out.  They have great WOW factor for management.
• Try...Catch:  This is the one I've been waiting for.  Finally we get some serious error trapping ability within SQL Server.  I just recently got into Java development where try...catch is used and it has been wonderful.  How many times have we seen in the forums a question about somebody's stored procedure that wasn't reporting errors properly, only to find that they were doing an IF @@ERROR test too late in the code.
• New Data Types:  Date and UTCDateTime will be useful.  I've never been a big fan of XML.  I think it's a useful structure at times but got WAY over-hyped.  Reminded me of the whole dot-com boom...too much hype.

Well, that's the big news as far as I'm concerned.  Looking forward to the PASS Community Summit coming up in a couple of weeks.