The last two days of the PDC were not as information packed, with regards to Yukon anyway, as the second day. I did find out, however, that the aforementioned XQuery support will use the same cost-based optimizer as the SQL query engine. This makes sense, of course, since XQuery can be embedded in TSQL and visa versa.

Depending on whom you believe, there were 7,000 to 9,000 people at this year’s PDC. The excitement level is high but still a bit muted because most of the cool stuff we saw is still a year or more away. Longhorn will introduce a radical shift in application development, so I suppose Microsoft needs to get everyone on board and ready for the change as soon as possible.

Most of the sessions today are not as interesting as their predecessors. The architecture symposium covered messaging and communication between systems via the use of asynchronous requests. The impact of this is that the only way to make it fault tolerant is to make damn near everything temporal. Recent ORM related posts covered this topic a bit and it is a favorite topic of mine so I suppose I’ll have more to say later as well. Distributed versioned databases seem to be a core architecture tenet for this messaging idea; as database designers we’ll need to adapt. The good news is that despite their preaching of XML, the Microsoft presenters have been careful to preach the merits of the relational store in a normalized fashion, especially for operational (transactional) data stores. Denormalization, they say, is useful for read-only databases; something you and I already knew, of course.

That aside, as database designers we need to get used to XML and XQuery if for no other reason than the fact that we’ll be called upon to fix database designs implemented as follows:

Customer(customer_id, customer_xml)
Order(order_id, order_xml)
Product(product_id, product_xml)

As a consultant, I welcome the job security!

The PDC was a great trip and I recommend the experience at least every few years or so. It has been fun, but I am tired of sitting all day and am welcome the end of back-to-back sessions. It was also good to see my old friend jMM and to talk FoxPro (yes, it is still around) again with the folks at the CoDe Magazine party (I seldom turn down free food).

I’m off to Phoenix for a few days of (desperately needed) R&R and visiting family and then it is back to the salt mines. I’ll continue the ORM ranting then.