The SQLPS Firestorm

Within the PowerShell community there's a firestorm raging over SQLPS.exe our mini-shell that we're introducing in SQL2K8. In his blog Michiel does a good job explaining the mini-shell and provides a script you can use to register the SQL Server provider extensions in a vanilla PS environment.

I love it when people who obviously have zero commercial software experience pontificate about what's right and wrong. Actually I don't love it. It something that pisses me off big time. These individuals think they're "helping" but they're not. They make claims that they want to understand but they don't really. To them the world is binary - they're TRUE and everyone who disagrees with them is FALSE. In elementary school we called these people bullies.

I'm purposefully not naming names here as it will do no good. I have no interest going head to head with them. It's a no win proposition - in fact everyone ends up loosing.

I don't like using this blog to air my opinions, I much rather focusing purely on technology and SQL Server. But they're defamation of the SQL Server team is simply uncalled for.

I'm very proud of the work the team did in SQL2K8. Is everything perfect? Absolutely not. Are we adding a ship load of value to the product? Absolutely.

If you don't like what we've down with PowerShell you're free to roll your own. PowerShell is an open environment for which you can register your own providers and build your own cmdlets. There's no restriction that states you must use sqlps.exe. Even within SQL Server Agent you can use the cmdshell subsystem to call powershell.exe directly. But we believe the vast majority of people will find value in sqlps.exe and the PowerShell subsystem in Agent. Hence why we built it.

Send us your feedback through connect.microsoft.com/sqlserver and I promise we'll listen. It doesn't mean we'll implement every suggestion but we'll listen. I've been developing software @ MS for over 4 years and the amount of debate and discussion that goes into key decisions is often mind numbing. Maybe it looks like we simply pull the answer out of our ass but that's not the case. We look at it from every angle and consider all of our constraints to arrive at the most optimum solution.