I’m very excited to announce the creation of a new group for the Atlanta area, this one focused on Microsoft Business Intelligence spearheaded by Teo Lachev.

It is starting as a “special interest group” offshoot of the AtlantaMDF, with the idea of it being a full blown user group at some point.  Here are the pertinent details for those interested:

1. The website is http://atlantabi.sqlpass.org

2. We will meet the last Monday of every month. The first meeting is on August 23.

3. The venue is the Matrix Resources Office in the Ashford Dunwoody area.

Matrix Resources
115 Perimeter Center Place
Suite 250 (South Terraces Building)
Atlanta, GA 30346

I hope to see many of you there in August.

I was in a conversation this morning with a couple other SQL guys (Twitter again) and the subject of Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) came up in regards to SQL Azure.  Running through the MSDN details it did not seem that they were supported.  After a couple emails with the SQL Azure team I have been given assurances that they will be added in a few months. 

The DMVs that will be available are only those which have database scope.  This is another great step in making SQL Azure a very viable alternative to local hardware.

Just had an awesome exchange with two members of the SQL Server community over Twitter.  While many people scratch their heads at what exactly to do with this tool (other than let everyone know they are eating, sitting, or worse.) the SQL community has exploded as of late.

All it took to get the conversation started was a question with a "#sql" tag.

I really enjoy a setting where a skinny geek in Atlanta can be talking with someone in Seattle and another in Slovenia about internals of a product we all make our livelihood from.  Good times indeed...

If you are doing any project work where you are responsible for moving data objects through multiple environments you will want to check out the post today on Gert Drapers blog.  You can get the slides from his recent presentation at the New England SQL Server Users Group.  Very interesting reading.

As a guy that came up through the data side of the house I am very accustomed to writing stored procedures as the interaction between database and application.  On my current project we are using L2SQL for that interaction and while most things have been acceptable I would not call it a pleasant experience.  Most of my concern has come from actually looking under the covers at the generated SQL and being absolutely appalled at some of the things I have seen.  In those cases we have fallen back to stored procedures, which in an odd way has been disappointing as I had hoped we would only do one or the other.

I have hope for the future based on a post on the ADO.NET team blog about improvements they are making in the generated SQL of Entity Framework.  I believe that EF will be the future for most data driven applications (whether you find that idea palatable or not) so I am happy to see early realization that version one has a long way to go in terms of generating quality SQL.

I am curious though to hear from the fine readers of this blog if you are still in stored procedure land or if your development team(s) kicked the tires on either EF or L2SQL.

There is a rather active anti-database movement afoot these days.  I initially chalked this up to the same “XML is going to replace databases” craziness that I heard back in the 90s but you can’t argue with the successes that some Web 2.0 companies have had going off traditional RDBMS architectures.  I still think it’s far too early in the game to declare SQL dead, or really even in trouble, but it’s an interesting topic to keep in the back of your mind if you make your living in relation to SQL.