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You recently spoke at the Amsterdam conference.
Which is more fulfilling - writing books or speaking at conferences, and why?
Tough question. Speaking gives
the more immediate gratification of seeing someone face to face, answering their
questions, and knowing that you really helped someone - it's simply more "real".
Book writing, however, has the sheer mass advantage. It's hard to beat the literally
hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have contacted me to personally say
thanks.
What would
you say are the major developments in SQL 2000?
Ouch - another tough one. The difficulty is in defining
"major". For me, the single biggest addition was definitely User Defined
Functions. This is a feature that's going to impact about every project out
there. After that, the XML integration and INSTEAD OF triggers are probably
the biggies.
What further improvements would you hope/expect
to see in the new few months/next version?
I'm very much looking forward to the XML Updategrams release
and also seeing XML support added to the OLAP functionality. For Yukon (the
next release of SQL Server), I'm looking forward to the additional language
support.
SQL Server's support for data warehousing and mining has been improved,
can you outline some of the new features?
Probably the glitziest of all
the new features is the new data mining functionality. Microsoft has added some
features here that are normally only found is outrageously expensive (often
6 figures per seat) software. Data Mining allows you to see relationships that
are not always intuitive (answer questions you didn't even know you should be
asking) and can even do some predictive modeling.
On more general use, however, is the new parent-child hierarchy.
One of the problems with the old OLAP Services (what Analysis Services was called
under 7.0) was that it couldn't handle what is called a "ragged hierarchy"
– that is, a hierarchy where the depth of the hierarchy was variable – often
totally unpredictable. The new parent-child approach deals with this problem
rather elegantly.