Steve Jones - SSC Editor (7/6/2015)
Stephen Hirsch (7/6/2015)
The problem is that the people who use the tools aren't the ones who buy the tools. People who use tools aren't nearly as important to MS (and to be fair, to any business) than the people who buy the tools.That's reality, but 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.
Great editorial, Steve, thank you!
I've more or less given up believing MS is going to fix basic user kluges, b/c there's no profit in it. I remember using Quattro Pro in the early 90's and I could easily choose to display the row and column headers of the currently-selected cell in different, high-contrast colors so that I could quickly see the address of the cell or range I selected. Office 2013 finally implemented something like this, using black-on-battleship grey. Whoopee.
A forehead-pounding ETL project I encountered on a 2005 Enterprise server a while back was that I could not use OPENROWSET() to read in a pipe-delimited file without editing the registry. Yup, the delimiter couldn't be changed to be anything but a comma in T-SQL (unless you wanted to read the entire line as a single string and then shred it, but why should I have to??). Here's a link that saved me: http://www.youdidwhatwithtsql.com/tsql-query-pipe-delimited-text-files-with-openrowset/429/[/url]
Now maybe that's been fixed/changed since 2005, but it's not hard to see why the PostgreSQL user was flummoxed by MS's implementation of CSV handling.
Rich