Article on Microsoft and Oracle OLAP offerings

This is an article by mark Rittman (an Oracle DBA) detailing the differences between Microsoft's and Oracle's OLAP offerings. Even going into Microsoft's forthcomine 2005 version.

http://www.dbazine.com/rittman4.shtml

Mark Rittman's blog

Richard Grimes disses, misses .NET

First off, I generally found Richard Grimes to be an interesting read. His farewell statement is included in that assessment.

Please read the article first, but here is my reaction to it. (Note: registration required)

Link

First thing Grimes talks about is the marketing snafu's that occurred in naming their system .NET and the language C#. Both are excellent examples of marketers on drugs. I think their conversations must have gone something like this: "Hey, nice weed man. How about we create names for the products so that no one can find information on them, including on our own developer sites. Then we can blame Google and we will come out like heroes, because, we're like Microsoft man."

Second: Mr. Grimes basically says that the .NET Framework is geared to VB developers looking for something better and more powerful (that is the same reason I moved to Delphi years ago). But that in all reality, C# is the most natural language for .NET and VB.NET never should have been written. Mostly because it has broken every single VB program ever written and pissed off a lot of developers who never wanted to be developers in the first place.

Also he argues that the framework is too big (25 meg) and to complex. And really, if you are coming from the simplistic world of VB, it probably is. From a Delphi stand point: it is still missing stuff. But he does have some good observations on how he thinks the .NET Framework was built and some of its shortcomings.

Third: He says that Microsoft isn't really committed to .NET because they really haven't written anything in it, or ported any of their old applications to -- specifically, money generating ones.

I disagree on this point. SharePoint and Reporting Services are both .NET applications, and SQL Server 2005 is going to have .NET built into it (though, that is not the same as saying that SQL Server 2005 will be built with .NET), and you will be able to execute .NET code in Stored Procedures and use .NET types as columns. IIS has some tie ins as well. And if you want the latest version of IIS, you have to get the latest version of the OS. I'd say that is a money generator myself.

The question comes back to: what has Microsoft done with .NET? They have built server applications. It might be a little disconcerting that they have not built much in the way of Windows applications, but truthfully the jump from Delphi or VB to WinForms wasn’t that great. The jump from ASP to ASP.NET was huge!

For myself, I know I have cost myself jobs because I refused to do traditional ASP development. I hate it. Loath it. I prefer assembly to traditional ASP. At least you get debugging with assembly and you are only dealing with one language! For traditional ASP you had to know the ASP object model, HTML, css, JavaScript, and VBScript.

With ASP.NET, that story is mostly changed. I can write an entire web application without writing a single line of HTML, JavaScript, or css. Now add that XML support is built in, better component support, the framework itself, and the list goes on. With ASP.NET, web programming is almost fun! It is almost like Windows development! Who knew?

But do you really want a Word or (gasp) Excel written in .NET? Is that the best place for the tool? Probably not. And I think it is important to remember that the .NET Framework is just a tool. Not THE tool. It is one way to get things done, and depending on the job, their might be better ways. I still use VB for some jobs, I still use Delphi for other, but for most I use C#. Just as Richard Grimes will continue to use his beloved C++.

The "I hate Oracle" club

I thought I might have to create this club myself.

Glad to see other people are all over this.

http://thedailywtf.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=25910

In the land of the geek, the nerd is king

But I'm not sure I should be proud of this score...

PostgreSQL hits 8.0

As seen on Slashdot! PostgreSQL hits 8.0.

Official site here:
http://www.postgresql.org

Here is what is new:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/whatsnew

ADO.NET native driver:

http://gborg.postgresql.org/project/npgsql/projdisplay.php

Delphi Driver:

http://www.zeoslib.net


Really, I have to get some time to really look into this thing sometime. In the world of Open Source databases, this one has a VERY good reputation (it has had features that MySQL is just getting for years now).

New Oracle stuff for .NET

http://www.bsdg.org/2005/01/oracles-net-developer-center.shtml

Check it out.

SQL Server 2005 Enhancements

Nice big document on MSDN that lists a lot of the changes that have happened to SQL Server 2005.

See it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/sql/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnsql90/html/sql_05TSQLEnhance.asp

Also, I'm still working on a post going over some of what we learned from Rich Hundhausen last Thursday. I'm hoping to have that one done tonight. (some, but not all. I have to leave some incentive to go see the presentation -- very good)

Mosha has a blog!!!

Mosha Pasumansky finally has a blog! Mosha is a lead engineer on the Microsoft Analysis Team, and (as I understanding) one of the lead architects of MDX and the Analysis Services security implementation.

http://sqljunkies.com/WebLog/mosha/

He also has a book: Fast track to MDX

Mozilla has 21% market share

Or so says this no-name site.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

How I learned to hate and despise Microsoft's naming convensions!

OK, here is my latest sob story...

How I learned to hate and despise Microsoft's naming conventions!
(I was trying for a "How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb" type title -- and failed)

I've gotten big into Unit Testing lately and have been working with NUnit to do so (not directly a Microsoft product), and I decided to create some unit tests for a web app I've been writing.

Test 1: see if the web server is up! Should be a simple test, just grab a file through the web server. Note: I've actually had a case or two where the server was running fine, but IIS had blown a hose loose -- couldn't ping it, couldn't restart the service, had to reboot the computer.

OK, I'm sure there is a class to do just that, no problem. I JFGI (new acronym used by one of my colleges -- Just F**king Google It) for the page. I'll try a search term like ".NET C# web winforms download".

No luck.

I try again with different parameters. No luck.

Basically, all that I keep getting are references to ASP.NET development (actually creating a webform -- not what I'm trying to do here) and .NET domain names (like .org and .com)! Basically, any page that had anything to do with web development, c#, and happened to list a web page with a .net domain root -- it got picked up! Try it, just do a search on .NET, or .NET framework.

Next try System.Web -- I thought that would be a likely location for such a class. May the force be with you on that one.

Oh ya, there were also several thousand references to the Cassini web server! -- written in C# for displaying ASP.NET pages. Kind of cool...but NOT what I as looking for!

I search Microsoft.com. No luck there either. In some ways this was even worse.

Half a day later, I finally found what I was looking for: HttpWebRequest in the System.Net namespace. Gonna have to look into that namespace some more later. But right now, I gotta get some work done. I'm a little bit behind now.

In fact, here is the code, should anyone care. You need to include the following namespaces: using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;

private string RetrieveWebPage(string url)
{
HttpWebRequest oRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(url);
oRequest.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
HttpWebResponse oResponse = (HttpWebResponse)oRequest.GetResponse();
Stream oStream = oResponse.GetResponseStream();
// read the stream in the encoded "utf-8" format
Encoding encode = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("utf-8");
StreamReader oReader = new StreamReader(oStream);
string sPage = "";
while (oReader.Peek() > -1)
sPage += oReader.ReadLine() + "\n";
return sPage;
}