I have just finished reading a great blog post over on Tom Kyte's blog (http://tkyte.blogspot.com/2005/09/most-incredible-statement-i-heard-this.html) regarding database performance and the attitude to what the database should be able to deal with.

For those of you who don't know, Tom is one of the foremost experts on Oracle Database, having written the Expert One-on-One Oracle book.  The interesting this here is that the comments on his blog apply equally to SQL Server.

With the launch of just over a month away, it got me wondering how developers will really view the new features and capabilities of this version of the database.

As I tour the country talking to both developers and IT professionals, there seem to be very different views on how to best use the database as you are developing an application.  On one side there is the group that wants the database to be nothing more than a place to dump data.  They claim that in doing so, they are not tying themselves to one particular database and their application will be more portable.  On the other side is the group that wants to use every single new feature of the database simply because it is there.

Now somewhere in the middle is probably the correct approach, but as Tom mentions, as you are designing an application, the data within the application is probably far more important than the actual application itself.  If you remember this, and you can learn to leverage the database features that are most relevant, you stand a much better chance of building an application that will perform well on the intended platform.

In my last tour around the country, I demonstrated to a group of developers, just how easy it was to get data out of SQL Server formatted as XML.  The response was, almost unilaterally, one of amazement.  What I was able to accomplish within a single select statement, was typically implemented in many lines of code outside the database.  So while the code outside the database may have been more portable, did it really perform as well as it could, in the environment that it was running in?

So remember, you need to design for performance right from the start.  So if this means educating the developers, then this should be your challenge.

What do you think?  Do you have developers that would rather use the database as a black box and not know anything about it?  Post a comment and let me know.

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