Despite their undoubted depth of their knowledge and frightening intelligence, those in charge of the T-SQL language at Microsoft often lack recent frontline experience. In this respect, they are less well-qualified to dictate the direction that T-SQL takes...

ta.bu.shi.da.yu (5/23/2009)

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Well, bare in mind I'm talking about organized projects, not little snippets of code. Look at the Samba project - they're about to get to the point where you can replace a DC in a Windows domain. Then look at the Postgres project, they're doing amazing work also.

Jeff Moden (5/23/2009)

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Well, bare in mind that you made no such stipulation to begin with.

I agree that well thought out projects can usually be a real benefit in open source environments. The problem is that many people add code that just shouldn't be called "code" even in such well organized projects.

Look at MySQL... I don't remember what the function is called but they have a function to create a numbered "table" on the fly. Last time I tested it (years ago now), it took a really, really long time just to generate a lousy million numbers. It was part of such an organized project and the code is terrible.

As with anything else, there are pros and cons to things like open sourced code.

The people best qualified to pass verdict on T-SQL, or any other tool, are the people for whose use it was designed. The right to debate and argue with developers at Microsoft about how they've built products is not the sole the preserve of academics, trainers, MVPs, and other assorted members of Microsoft's "inner circle".