Jeff Moden (7/6/2015)
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (7/6/2015)
...the problem is MS is not investing in the tooling or features beyond what's needed to get a sale. That's short term thinking that allows other tools and platforms to gain traction.You took the words right out of my mouth. If they spent just one version fixing or bringing up to date those things that need it (and that includes a lot of "Closed - Working As Designed" items) and things like fixing ACE drivers and updating BCP and fixing things like the privs problems associate with BULK INSERT and whole lot of other things with the engine and TQL itself (seriously!!! Like the fact that shrink still doesn't work correctly, etc), then a whole lot more people would have a whole lot better opinion of both MS and SQL Server.
And, while it's understood that Azure is important to future success, fix the product/customer base that you already have in the stand-alone product and then migrate those fixes to Azure. It's a win-Win-WIN for anyone and everyone involved.
Man, this is starting to give me flashbacks of my old video game development days of when customers want existing bugs and features fixed before pushing out new content and expansions to the game.
It's not a bad thing and not a good comparison because we are not forced into the next new expansion or game content like a video game is, but I feel the mentality from Microsoft is likely still the same regardless. They want to put all their focus on what's in front of them rather than what's behind them with SSIS, SSAS and SSRS.
I almost feel it's so we continue to upgrade. Otherwise, if we are absolutely content with what we have, why continue to invest? I could be wrong as I don't have much experience in all versions of SQL Server and what's coming down the line with 2016, but it makes sense.
As for SSIS, I have little problems using it to help with my ETL processing. I don't depend on it as much and only use it when I have to. Otherwise, I use TSQL to do everything I can and it seems to do a good job for me.