Posted by Herb Caudill on 03/22/06 01:18

Of course lots of people care about performance, and they should. My
point is that performance is not the only thing that matters, something
that seems lost on many contributors to this newsgroup. If you have a
one huge database and lots of developers, it makes sense to focus on
performance. If you have lots of small databases and just a couple of
developers, which is my situation, it makes better business sense to
focus on developer productivity instead. For me database performance and
scalability are simply non-issues. On the other hand, code reuse,
encapsulation of logic, and things like that are absolutely paramount.
(Here's a horrifying example for you: We deliberately use SELECT * where
possible, because it means that we can add a field to an application and
only have to touch our code in three places, instead of twenty.)

In the past Microsoft has been very good about balancing performance
against developer productivity, and about preserving backward
compatibility as well. There are a number of solutions that they could
have come up with here that would have been preferable to breaking
existing applications that depended on an application's previous
behavior, even when that behavior was undocumented.

The fact of the matter is that SQL server used to work the way most
na

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