Server Management Objects (SMO) is a very impressive product. SMO (and its previous incarnation, SQL-DMO) is essentially an object-oriented interface into the management of SQL Server installations and databases. It provides an intuitive way for the VB or C# programmer to automate any operation that can be performed via SSMS.

We’ve run a few SMO articles in the past and to our surprise they have been met with little more than polite indifference. So, what is the problem? Well, firstly, DMO-based scripts worked via OLE automation. They could be run from any scripting language, even TSQL. Many DBAs spent many months DMO-automating their administration tasks only to find that they couldn’t be used in SQL Server 2005. To use SMO means Visual Studio and NET Framework only. Microsoft eventually did a U-turn and released DMO for 2005 (although without support for features specific to SQL 2005), but it still created a lot of ill feeling among DBAs.

A more fundamental problem is that the Object Oriented model, while crystal clear to the geeks at Microsoft, is alien to many of the DBAs who were the product’s intended users. There is a vast cultural gap between SQL and C#.

In SQL Server 2008, with the introduction of PowerShell and “PowerSMO”, I wonder if Microsoft is about to make the same mistake again. PowerShell may be crystal clear to the dome-heads of Redmond, but is as intuitive as runic scripts to many of the DBAs at the coal-face.

Personally, I think that Microsoft would stand a much better chance of having the DBA community embrace the technology with open arms, if they had instead provided a refined relational model for the management of SQL Server (think DMVs, but more versatile, with CRUD operations).

What do you think? Is it high time that Microsoft acknowledged that there is room for a richer diversity of IT culture, and that it is futile to try to impose the C# object-oriented orthodoxy on everyone? Or do DBAs need to “adapt or die”? Add your comments to this blog and the best entry will receive a prize.

Cheers,

Tony.