Microsoft Roslyn and SQL CLR 2012 : Impact analysis

Few weeks back Microsoft announced CTP release of a new application development framework codenamed Microsoft Roslyn. To define it in one line for database professionals, it can be perceived as "Compiler as a Service" and gives more granular control of application code compilation. An in-depth explanation about the same can be read from here.

Database professionals would be ready to leave this post by now thinking what do we have to do with application development frameworks ? What's new in that ? Any application would request connection to the database through a managed driver, send queries and return results which can be very well governed by database administrators. And that's true to a great extent too !

But here is the catch. An ambassador of .NET framework sits in the world of SQL Server, i.e. SQL CLR. If I ask a question to DB professionals, what do you hate to have in your database server environment, most of the professionals would answer "dynamism, ad-hoc queries, surprises...". And Roslyn brings lot of dynamism never seen before, which makes it very powerful as the assembly behavior can be very much unpredictable. Hence tasks such as security regulation and dependency analysis would become more complex due to this granular division of the complier services.

In a typical MVC framework, Data Access Layer assemblies generally used to make calls to database. From an another angle, this framework is developed for agile application development targeted for cloud environment. But if application developed with these framework and stuffed with lots of dynamism is hosted on SQL environment, it would interesting to see how much acceptance it gains from data professionals. As of now its not seamlessly supported on SQL Server 2012, but if Microsoft has a long roadway for it, then future cummulative updates can be expected to bring integration features in SQL Server 2012 for Microsoft Roslyn.

An interesting example of Microsoft Roslyn that demostrates a flavor of my thoughts can be read from here.