Where Do I Want To Go Today? - Rich Data Types
Taking a note from Microsoft's own page, I've decided to share some of my wishes for where I want SQL Server to go. Today.
Meaning this is what I'm looking for now, the things that I'd like to see implemented in future releases. Now I missed the Yukon preview and haven't read too terribly much on it, so I may be asking for something that's coming. If it's not under NDA, let me know.
Otherwise I hope to get some feedback about whether you'd like to see this feature or not. Or maybe you've got something I've forgotten on this feature. Either way let me know. I've got a few and I'm splitting them up to keep comments focused on this one feature. If you've got a wish, send it to me with a description. I'll credit you (if you want) and add my comments before dropping it out there in front of everyone.
Reading Tags
Again, I'm not completely convinced that I need this, but I see it appearing in other RDBMSes and I am sure that there are lots of people that will use these features.
What I'd like to see is support, perhaps through add ons or extenders, for rich data types, particularly multimedia, but also common types like Word files. Now I know that these can be stored as binary objects, but there is so much more that could be done.
Imagine if you stored Word files in some table, but you could index them? Imagine SQL Server could index the text with a full text type search. Imagine that the Word document meta data, like author, title, summary, etc were readable from the document. Think how rich and full featured you could easily make an application.
Now I know that you could store this meta data in your table. I've done it before. Build a table, add columns for title, author, etc. and then include one for the binary object. Fill them in from the application and you're good.
But why write the code? Hell, that's a great place for a third party to build an indexer if MS would provide the plugin API. Or charge for them. It can't be that difficult to write the code and it could easily be extended. Read ID3 tags from MP3s, read the tags from video. It's going to need to be done as SQL makes its way into the file system. Extend it out to the RDBMS and I know there will be takers. It would really start to make sense to store more stuff in the database if you could search it.
To me it's not only a convenience, but also a huge opportunity for MS to expand market share and implement SQL Server in place of media servers, image servers, etc.
Other items in this series:
- Upsert
- Real Time Defragging
- Lossless Performance
- Bidirectional Indexes
- Index Tuning Wizard
- Included Indexes
Steve Jones
©dkRanch.net May 2003