I went to my first SQL Server user group meeting today in Microsoft’s Southbank Melbourne offices. It was quite an interesting night – tasty drinks, enough pizza to satisfy even the hungriest ninja turtle, and an excellent 2 hour session by Greg Low on the CLR integration in SQL Server.
I’ve listened to all of Greg’s SQLDownUnder podcasts over the past 12 months, and always enjoyed them, so it was great to actually be able to see him while he’s speaking. I have had a brief play around with the CLR integration in SQL Server, but nothing much past creating a simple UDF while I had a spare morning between projects. In his session, Greg took us through a quick rundown of what .NET is, and why the developers are begging the DBAs to let it into the database, and then launched into examples of what you can do with managed code running inside SQL Server. Interspersed throughout the benefits were some stern warnings of what NOT to do with managed code – although Greg didn’t explicitly say not to write, say, a SMTP server…
All in all, a great night!