VistaDB Coolest Feature?
What do you think the coolest feature of VistaDB is today? I get asked this question quite a bit and I never know how to answer.
Hmm, we have a lot to choose from. I am going to rattle of a few of my favorites and see what you guys come up with also.
Jason's Picks
100% Dot Net - A lot of people don't care about this, but I do. The ability to write something this large and complex as 100% managed code has really proven out the development and runtime efforts of Microsoft. They have a great platform, and it is only growing stronger.
I have recently had to go back and write a bunch of C++ stuff. In many cases my C# versions of the code were faster than the C++ code. Simply amazing.
XCopy deployment - Very cool to be able to xcopy my databases across boxes / storage keys / etc and still open the same database from Mono, Windows, CF editions.
SQL Server syntax - This is a biggie to most people. And it is very nice. I would like to see the parser abstracted at some point so people could write their own parsers on top of VistaDB low level engine. Something like lolcats query language would just be funny, but a parser for mySQL would be quite functional.
Isolated Storage - Cool to some people in Active Directory environments. Otherwise I don't think a lot of people care.
Data Builder with Source - It is a good tool, but I don't think it is great yet. It still need a lot of cleanup and polish. Mike and I have a few ideas here, but they will take more time to complete (and maybe the new hire can start here). It does show images from a table (sort of nice), but need a few more friendly features.
TSQL Procs - This is the uber coolness that attracts most people. SQL CE can't do it. No one else runs SQL Server stored procedures like we do.
CLR Procs - I personally think that CLR Procs are about 100x more powerful than a TSQL Proc, but more difficult to create. Have any good ideas for a CLR Proc demo? Let us know.
DDA - Having a choice in APIs can be a good thing. Need quick and dirty, go DDA. A lot of people seem to shy away from it because they are then off the ADO.NET 2 provider roadmap. It is not that bad of a thing. Gets the job done, and you can create some very neat looking apps with very small code bases.
Visual Studio Integration - This is pretty awesome, but I don't think that many people use it. It involves some training, but is a very powerful tool.
What do you think?
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Comments
Yiannis on on 6.18.2008 at 9:15 AM
I also like the feature of VistaDB to be used in a network of two to five computers, which is very easy to deploy and manage because it is located in a shared folder.
Also the database performance is very good. I migrated a portable application running from a flash disk, from Access to VistaDB and I noticed a performance boost, especially when reading data from the same table.
Jason Short on on 6.18.2008 at 2:58 PM
Shared drive access is a very cool feature. SQL CE cannot do that either. :) The ability to setup a quick ad-hoc network is very powerful, thanks for posting.
Joe Griffith on on 6.19.2008 at 1:11 PM
Here's my LEAST favorite feature. You can't associate any other file extension with the data builder except vdb3.
We have valid reasons for using different file extensions for our databases. When a use double clicks on one it runs our application and opens the database.
On my computer, however, I want it to run the databuilder and open the database. Why can't I do that?
Jason Short on on 6.20.2008 at 9:59 AM
Sure you can. If you want a custom extention, go into the registry and build a mapping for the extention. Look at the one for vdb3 and copy it. It passes a %1 on the command line for the load option.
OR - We include the complete code to the Data Builder with all full licenses. Modify it to load / save your extention by default.