Monday, May 17, 2010

5 Features SQL Server Doesn’t Need

Paul Randal (@PaulRandal) started this chain of blog posts with his post, What 5 Things Should SQL Server Get Rid Of? and I was tagged by Michelle Ufford (@SQLFool) in her post, Delete 5_Useless_Things FROM [SQL Server].  Many will be repeats, but that’s partly because SQL Server is such a good product and mostly because some features cause more problems than they solve.

  1. Autoclose – I don’t know of anyone who uses it and I can’t think of any reason why you would want to use it.  Even most base laptops running SQL Server Express have enough resources to keep databases open.
  2. Autoshrink – another one mentioned by almost everyone.  It causes more problems than it solves.  As a matter of fact I can’t think of any problems it actually solves in this day of terabyte drives, raid arrays, and SANS.
  3. Encryption of Stored Procedures, Functions, and Views – Odds are whatever you are doing in T-SQL has been done before.  Not only has it been done before, but it has probably been published on a blog.  Jeremiah Peschka (@peschkaj) covers this in his recent post, Encrypted Stored Procedures and Their Effect on my Rug.
  4. Master as the default database – changing and adding objects to the master database is not a recommended practice, so why would you make that the default database context when a user connects to SQL Server without specifying a database or having a default specified?
  5. Primary Key Defaulting to the Clustered Index – Sure, often times the primary key is a surrogate key which is narrow, unchanging, and monotonically increasing so it may be a good choice for a clustered index, but this isn’t always the case.  A Primary Key is a constraint so I should have to choose if it is a clustered index or not.

You can check out Paul’s blog to see many of the other posts in this meme.  I’m a bit late to the party and I think most people I know I have already been tagged so I won’t be tagging anyone this time around.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Jack,

    Completely confirmed. Let me add the SQL Server 2000 XML functions.

    Greets
    Flo

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Jack,

    Completely confirmed. Let me add the SQL Server 2000 XML functions.

    Greets
    Flo

    ReplyDelete

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