If you were restricted to only the Microsoft enabled software where would you be? Would you be restricted to SQL Server, Azure SQL Server, Azure Blob Storage or Azure Table Storage as a long term data persistence engine?
The answer is probably no in real terms. Azure and the Microsoft stack also support using technologies that are not Microsoft centric. Azure now supports deployment of MongoDB, for example, and Hadoop is a first class citizen which may be called from Java or C# applicaitons.
Setup Hadoop Cluster Setup HD Insight MongoDB on Azure
Microsoft also sells the Oracle stack running on Azure servers allowing you to take advantage of a great number of their proprietary packages..
The point is that the Microsoft Stack is not necessarily restricted to Microsoft only technologies. It continues to embrace open source tools and frameworks more and more. Consider the integration of git into Team Foundation Services. That will be a huge win for shops needing powerful version control tools.
It would be my hope that with strong integration with competing technologies it will be an encouragement for Microsoft generated products to not be simply, “Also ran”, instead of “Best of Breed”. Only time will tell.
Do you care to predict how this will play out in the long run? Are you using or considering using non-Microsoft tools in your Microsoft deployments? Share your insights or predictions here, or drop an Email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
As a response from our editorial on SSIS from long ago, Tom sends in his experience using SSIS.
Tom writes:
SSIS is not right for me. I am a .NET developer. I started learning SSIS because of the many ETL articles I read saying SSIS was the program of choice.
I quickly found that:
- SSIS was not granular enough for me. I wanted more detail than the GUI provided.
- Either SSIS could not do what I wanted, or I could not figure out how to do it in SSIS. This is unworkable for projects with a deadline.
- SSIS does have speed, but we can get good speed with BCP and .NET SQLBulkCopy.