For the first time in years I’ve been doing some T-SQL programming in SQL Server 2008 and had forgotten just how bad the language really is:
- Flow control (all the begin/end stuff) feels clunky
- Exception handling is poor. Exceptions dont bubble in the same way they do in every other language. There’s no re-throwing unless you code it yourself and the raiserror function isn’t even spelt correctly (this caused me some headaches!)
- String handling is poor
- The only sequence type is a table. I had to write a function to split a string based on a delimiter and had to store it in a table which had the string parts along with a value indicating there position in the sequence.
- If you need to doa lookup in the stored proc then manipulating the results is painful. You either have to use cursors or hack together a while loop with a nested lookup if the results contain some sort of ordering column
I realize I could code up my stored procedures using C#, but this will require permissioning the server to allow CLR functions, which isn’t an option at my workplace.
Does anyone know if there are any alternatives to T-SQL within SQL Server, or if there are any plans to introduce something. Surely there’s got to be a more modern alternative…
PS: This isn’t intended to start a flame-war, I’m genuinely interested in what the options are.
There is nothing wrong with T-SQL; it does the job it was intended for (except perhaps for the addition of control flow structures, but I digress!).
Perhaps take a look at LINQ? You can write CLR Stored Procedures, but I don’t recommended this unless it is for some feature that’s missing (or heavy string handling).