Wednesday, January 26, 2005 - Posts
Back in December, I got to spend a good amount of time with Bob, learning what I could about Yukon from him, but really trying to figure out how he learned all that he learned about it. Bob is about one of the best teachers and story tellers I know, but what utterly fascinates me about what he does is how he thinks people though problems. The problem at hand today is explaining the differences in XQuery's behavior when dealing with typed and untyped XML instances. (part I, part II).
Unless you're really paying attention to what he's doing by how he's talking about the problem, you're missing something, I think. But its hard from me to point at the specifics. You have to step back from what he's saying technically and see how he's working through the problem to get it. For example, he starts with a simpler but similar problem, then builds on that to build out a converstant experient that solves the larger problem. Then he asks you to apply what you he's shown you to solve another branch of the problem to reinforce the totallity of it all. That's teaching without teaching and I can say say its been darned effective on me.
But what really intriges me about what Bob does is that he's done this for so long that it utterly naturally -- just like he's talking to you about it over a beer.
Oh, I do have one of the answers, I think.
DECLARE @x xml(ages)
SET @x = '<age xmlns="urn:ages">12</age>'
SELECT @x.query('
declare default namespace "urn:ages";
string(/age[1])')
GO
That is, you still have to give a fn:string a single value from a sequence and you have to match the namespaces used in the schema correctly. But I'm not sure what the other answer is just yet.
Who is Slava? Well, I really don't know. I'm guessing Slava is an SDE or better working on the SQL Engine team. But that's not really what matters. What does matter is what Slava posted today as the first post at http://weblogs.asp.net/slavao/. Not your typical hello world indeed! Rather its a pretty interesting look at how to determine how much memory pressure is building in the Yukon engine by tracking Virtual Address Space. What best of all is the explanation of why it matters.
Keep it up, Slava, and you'll have me as a faithful reader for a long time.
My favorite at the moment is Tim Hibbard for speaking his mind about a recently user group meeting in KC. While I'm not sure I feel the same way about the speaker in question -- I wasn't there of course -- but I have seen him do his thing at other community events. He did the same thing there. I guess that's his style. Hey, I'm all for whatever works for you, and I'm sure my style would drive lots people nuts. At the same time, I've got to wonder if us heartlanders really do some stylistic preferences in presentations that clash with those styles from speakers from the East Coast. I've experienced it alot over the years, but I didn't really think much about it until Tim brought it up. I really enjoyed my visit with the KC folks and they seems enjoy having me come in. Was that because I was one of them, or because of the content or because of the my style? That's something I guess I need to dig into if I'm going to keep growing as a regional speaker.
And just to be clear: there are some speakers from the East Coast that I really feel an affinity with: Dan Sullivan, Robert Hurlbut and Michael Earls to name a few of them. Now if I can just figure out what they are doing that makes that happen, I've got something to work from.
Since the first of the year, my life has been, as Emeril might put it, "kicked up to notches unknown." So today was back to basics day for me, doing three things that restore some sense of balance. Namely:
- I went to Toastmasters. We had a really lively meeting and made me feel a little more right with my HDR-self.
- I read and mediated on a new random fetch of Death Poems. One of them was written by the Monk Tetto Giko. The truth is never taken from another. One carries it always by oneself.. Its helpful to anchor yourself on thoughts like that.
- Got a nice Email from John Stacey just saying thanks for helping him out in the SQL Express newsgroup. That felt good.
So what are the basics? Enjoy what you are doing, draw from your own strength and be thankful for the opportunites you get to help others to do the same. If you can do those things, its pretty hard for anybody or anything else to keep you down for long.
I'm really happy to see my local and district cohorts on a blogging role as of late. For example, Phil Wolfe published his his Breadcrumb Control recently, and Phil Rieck wrote what I've been feeling about Visual Studio Team System since I heard about its availability -- or lack there -- of in MSDN Universal.
But other leader of our local INETA group, Joe Olsen has also been on a tear the past few days. Need proof? Check out how he Deface-plates Web Services.
Of course, our partners from Microsoft haven't been sleeping either. Mike Benkovich, our Developer Community Champion, has opened BenkosTips as a source for information from about his MSDN events. My favorite Developer Evangelist in the North Central District Jeff Brand shows us that even Microsofties have their share of technology problems. At least he has a great sense of humor about it.
Now, what about the rest of you? Its time to start making some noise, eh?
Somebody in the SQL Server 2005 Data Access Newsgroup asked the question I've been wondering myself: Where's the JDBC driver for SQL Server 2005?. But they were reporting an error using the 2000 driver -- something I was getting ready to try myself fairly soon. Turns out that driver isn't quite ready yet and Microsoft is trying to shake out some of the bugs before they release it for a first look.
But now I'm thinking that it really doesn't matter that much to me. Why?
Because with SQL Server's ability to expose stored procedures as Web Services, I don't really need something like JDBC in some cases. Instead of writing essentially client/server or n-tier code, I can look at using an SOA design instead. That means trading I'd be performance for a more loosely-coupled design. In some cases, that's not such a bad idea. Obviously not in all cases though. Gives me more fun things to think about at least.
I'll be the first to tell you that what I know about WinForms wouldn't even start to fill a TextBoxControl. But friend, MVP and fellow XML junkie Christoph Schittko is talking about what looks to be a bug with event handling there. Hopefully one of my three readers will have seen this and have better ideas that I did about it.