I have two little boys at home, and my parents were both teachers. It gives me a strange relationship with our public schools – I am passionate about them, and the quality of education I want for my kids, but I have to keep my distance a little, lest they drive me completely around the bend. One reason it’s so frustrating: among all the complex challenges our schools face, administrators and school reformers alike are stuck in an infinite loop of starting over again before anything is finished. Before one curriculum is complete, someone wants a new one. A new educational idea arrives on the scene before the last one even gets a chance to be evaluated. We have to break eggs to make an omelet, but all we do is the egg-breaking part. And our school system is the very apex of the idea, “too many cooks in the kitchen.”
Sadly, the people working on all the flavors of SQL Server management tools seem to me to be stuck in the same type of self-destructive loop. For now six or eight years, depending how you count, the management tools for SQL Server have gone sideways, or around in a circle, instead of forward.
Five Versions 2.0 != One Version 10.0
This post was prompted by a short exchange I had on Twitter this morning. Someone asked a simple question: Why is there, again, another management & dev tool for SQL Server. My off-the-cuff response was that the team at Microsoft keeps on starting over again instead of moving forward. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that is literally true: through Management Studio, BIDS, Team System/Data Dude and now Juneau, and even to some degree Crescent, the various tools teams continue to slide sideways, and deliver sort of disjoint, bland, V 2.0 mediocrity. We need version 10 at this point, not version 1 or 2 again. Really.
This isn’t an attack on any of the developers working hard on those tools and features. Some of the specific features and capabilities are really interesting. The problem is with the process – just as in some fundamental public school issues. In the current vernacular:
(Smart People + Good Intentions) * Deeply Flawed Coordination = #EPICFAIL
There are a lot of good ideas. There are a lot of challenges. There are a lot of conflicting requirements and conflicting opinions about what a tool like this should be. That’s what design is for. If the problem were simple, design would not be necessary. This is just a design problem.*
80% of Good Design is Synthesizing Conflicting Requirements
So it’s a hard problem. Administrators want administration tools, monitoring, troubleshooting. Developers want development tools, code writing environments. BI people maybe want graphical programming tools like BIDS SSIS projects. We all want the tools to be elegant and simple to use. I get that. But that doesn’t mean you’ll solve the problem by ten years of starting over again, annually, creating different flavors of the same tools. It gets solved by leadership, visionary design, and synthesis. It is possible to make one environment that meets all these needs. But it takes conviction, courage, time and, most of all, design.
What do we have now, six years or so into the SSMS “era?”
-
Still total inconsistency in the way SSMS treats basic features like scripting objects.
-
One passable query writing environment in the SSMS query window itself, which somehow(?) has not made it into any other place in the whole suite of products. There is no even C- level query editing capability in any MS BI tool, for example. It’s not even in the Table Designer. But the code’s been sitting there in SSMS all this time.
-
B- Intellisense, with better provided by a third party.
-
No code formatting, again with a fine third party solution.
-
The object tree in SSMS has had the same cruel joke of a design, that most people seem to either barely tolerate or hate, this whole time.
-
Activity Monitor. Ugh.
-
A query plan viewer that is so stale, so old fashioned, that a third-party company (and thank you SQL Sentry) could walk in and create a free one that is many times better.
-
Decent diagnostic data from the engine (DMV’s) with NO decent UI associated.
The reasonable thing would have been to put someone with some design sense on this problem to improve the tool. Version 3, version 4, version 5. Forward progress.
Instead, people complained from outside MS, and people within perhaps had some new ideas, but instead of having the courage to synthesize those challenges into a better product, we keep going in a circle. So I am begging: would someone please stand up over there in Redmond and say, “enough.” I want SSMS 3.0.
* This is the thing Steve Jobs, love him or hate him, “gets.”