SQL Select helps tune a car engine

In this post: Fox helps drag racer win Microsoft Start Something Amazing Award, I wrote about an application written for drag racers. Don has kindly posted a comment on that entry detailing some of the aspects of his system. It’s a more detailed look at a highly sophisticated application that has evolved, benefiting from years of experience on the inside.

Who would have thought that SQL Select, weather stations, wireless devices, could help predict the engine tune-up required for the next drag race?

Applications are always evolving and improving. As new ideas surface (using weather stations, tracking opponent’s performance) and technologies (wireless, on board computers) emerge, they can be incrementally added to the application. An underlying platform change, such as CPU, operating system or programming language needs to be able to accommodate newer technologies (USB, Wireless) and yet still be backward compatible to ease the transition of the application over perhaps decades.