Project Houston CTP and Microsoft Quadrant

Today Microsoft declared CTP1 of project code-named "Houston". Almost everyone who keeps their tab on SQL Azure would be aware of this news. By definition, Project Houston is a web-based silverlight interface managed and hosted in Azure data centers, and it facilitates access and management of SQL Azure data and databases. More about the same can be read from this blog post on SQL Azure Team blog. Jamie Thomson has generously shared credentials which can be used to connect to a SQL Azure database using project "Houston", and the same can be read from here.

Regarding the user interface of project Houston, I feel a scaled down reflection of the tool "Quadrant" which is a part of SQL Server Modeling Services. The user interface is pretty basic as of now, but if the user interface can be made similar to Quadrant, I feel that it would be a great way to browse data from SQL Azure than giving it just the SSMS style of user interface. I was very impressed with the UI of Quadrant, and as project Houston is a silverlight based tool, it has the potential to go much ahead than the traditional grid or windows like user interface for browsing / managing data and/or databases.

Those who are not aware of what is Quadrant and how it looks like, they can go through an article which I authored on the same from here.

SQL Server Modeling Services ( Oslo ) : Buddy of Application under the label of Database

In the history of mankind, time in divided in two parts : AD and BC, and my time in my career history is divided between .NET (BC) and Business Intelligence (BC + AD). Coming down to the language that humans can understand, I mean to say that I am a child of .NET and SQL Server, so I see any of these technologies from unbiased eyes. Apparently from the title, you can make out the topic of this post is SQL Server Modeling Services.

It was known as Microsoft Codename "Oslo", which is now known as SQL Server Modeling Services. The Nov CTP Release 2 of the same has got released a couple of days back and can be downloaded from here. There are majorly two tools released in this CTP : Quadrant and Intellipad and one major language "M" ( Microsoft Codename M ). Looking at the name and the features it offers, it seems like this package is more intended towards the benefit of the .NET community, but still SQL Server also has got a share of it. It has got quite some level of dependency on .NET 4.0 RC and SQL Server 2008. "M" is a quite interesting language to check out as it can generate T-SQL code from the so-called modeling language, which looks more like a C# code ( bad news for SQL Developers is that vice-versa is not possible). To me it looks like this is where Microsoft has created a hybrid of .NET programmers (C# coders in specific) and SQL Developers.

If you have SQL Server 2008 and VS 2010 installed, it would not be a bad idea to install these tools and check out the use of the same. Quadrant is something of the flavor of Toad for Data Analysts from a functionality viewpoint, but limited to SQL Server 2008 databases only. I am of the opinion that one should at least give a try to these tools, if not to the language "M".

And finally about the comment in the topic of this post, I think that though it's called SQL Server Modeling Services, it's more inclined toward .NET development where developers can validate their data and business tiers using these services and generate a T-SQL code out of the same. This might make a small application team self-sufficient to a certain level, but if it's used with the intention of making the database a slave of application, it would be suicidal attack on the project in my viewpoint :)