Houston we don’t have a problem

Phil Factor recently wrote an editorial about Project Houston. I agree with his meta point that database design tools have not evolved as quickly as we’d like but I disagree with his characterization that Project Houston is a failure because it doesn’t fulfill the needs of the professional DBA. This is like saying a motorcycle is flawed because it can’t seat more than 2 people. Just as a motorcycle was designed for a particular usage pattern so to was Project Houston. We conducted extensive research on the target user to understand how they work and what they need from a database tool. Project Houston satisfies the top requirements. Oh, and we don’t wear suits.

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 01, 2010
  Dan. Sorry to give any implication that I thought that Project Houston is a failure. Not a bit of it. What you've provided is necessary to any development IDE for creating Azure databases, but not, I believe, sufficient. Obviously, I have in mind all the features that already exist for the Web-based remote administration of hosted SQL Server databases such as the excellent  MyLittleAdmin.  However, my editorial was mainly concerned with the integration of database design tools into the table-build process, as it is from flaws in the design that so many databases hit problems.