"Unplugged" night @ SqlConnections

Last night we had a bunch of Microsoft folks up front in a room and took questions from the audience. I was pretty pleased with the questions as there weren't many "it is broke...why" type questions which really require a lot of digging to find out the root cause. There were a lot of questions around "how do I do this" or "What is the level of support around that." Good questions. We didn't have many relational engine people there and several of the questions were targeted in that area. I did my best to answer some but I live way up the "food chain" in Sql Server so I wasn't always the best person to ask.

One question that did come up that comes up all the time is sysdepends and will it be better in Sql 2005. The short answer is no. The big problem is that the Database engine uses a run-time binding to determine what objects should be referenced. In a simple example if I have a stored proc which references a table Foo but does not qualify it with a schema then which Foo will get referenced will depend on which user is running the sproc and which schema is their default schema. There are some potential fixes we are looking at for the next release but for Sql 2005. Things are pretty much what they are today in Sql 2000.

The other question that came up was our compliance to ANSI-99. I know we are very close now but not 100%. I'm trying to find out the exact details and will post them here.