Posted by --CELKO-- on 03/24/06 06:57

>> Of course lots of people care about performance, and they should. My point is that performance is not the only thing that matters, omething that seems lost on many contributors to this newsgroup. <<

I agree!

80%+ of the cost of a system is in maintaining it over its lifetime.
Ergo, following standards so that any programmer who speaks the
language can read and work with the code base is the biggest source of
total improvement. Read any SEI, DoD etc. paper for the last 30 years
about the total cost.

I feel like I am teaching a freshman SE class again ..

>> that SQL server used to work the way most naïve users would expect it to work - that is, views and functions with an ORDER BY clause returned ordered results. <<

So, if most people think 2 + 2 = 5 then the accounting package should
change? Why, of course! We want to have the most imcompetent people
writing code and that the programs produce crap, run slow, etc. because
it might hurt their feelings if their invincible ignorance is not made
law.

>> there are any number of ways that Microsoft could have pleased me *and* the massive-scalability crowd: <<

No, not really. If you mean VLDB (with few users -- DW), then the use
of physically contigous storage has frozen SQL Server at a certain
level. You then go to Teradata and SAND and some other products.

If you mean lots of users with a relatively small RDBMS like a
website, then this is another game Much of that work has to be done in
a middle tier, mirrors, etc.

It is not a simple matter of ORDER BY being turned on or off. It is a
matter of parallelism versus sequential processing. We are not talking
about 1-2 orders of magnitude -- there can be at 7-8 orders of
magnitude difference as it tries to preserve ordering.
..

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