A SQLCLR Twitter Client

Thanks for the plug. I'm going to prepare a preview version of Tweet-SQL after I return from holiday (est. end of October). If all works out well I plan to produce a similar one for facebook [URL]www.fb-sql.com[/URL], digg, and salesforce.
I see the CLR as an exciting addition to the SQL Server toolset but I do appreciate why you might be concerned. I'd like to blog about this and include your input if you're willing.
Rhys

Hi Rhys. Are you going to release it open source?

Testing bbcode
[URL=www.fb-sql.com]www.fb-sql.com[/URL]

Hi Jason,

That's not currently part of the plan as I fancy trying my hand as a independent software developer. But if thing don't work out commercially I would certainly consider doing so. In general I will be looking to release some free software with each product (the Twitter SSIS component for example.)

Cheers,

Rhys

Are you sure it's a good idea for production notices? What kind of uptime and guaranteed delivery SLAs does Twitter have? Will Twitter notify you if it has an internal problem and its systems are going down for a while? Perhaps if Twitter offers this as a premium service it could make some revenue, but just using the basic free service to do this stuff is probably not a good choice in my opinion.

I wouldn't suggest twitter alone either but it could be a good supplement with an RSS feed for creative uses.

This is hilarious; what an interesting

Everybody who thinks Twitter is more reliable than their SQL Servers, please take one step forward. Alright, ready, aim, you're fired.
Now if you're still standing, please point at your company's internet security staff - the guys who are letting Twitter through the firewall. Hey, it's not polite to use that finger.
In all seriousness, it makes perfect sense for shops that put SQL Servers in the DMZ. If you put SQL in the DMZ where it can't be managed by your normal management tools, and maybe can't be monitored by your normal monitoring tools, then you're probably the kind of shop that would be cool with using CLR-based tools to send your

Jason, something wrong with your site? It appears to be truncating comments ... could both Jason and Brent have hit submit too soon? Seems a bit too coincidental.

I saw that and I am working on it.

We all know about twitter reliability which they have been very upfront about. How about SMS? Have you ever had a message delivered many hours after it was sent? I certainly have.

Many companies now host bits of technology outside the company server rooms, i.e. salesforce, ziff leads and so on. Us tech guys are still going to have to manage and integrate these systems. Why not via CLR Web Services? Isolate it on a separate box if you wish, lock down routes to the internet, ensure you're running with minimal permissions.

Now of course I don't think there are many companies out there yet that view Twitter as business critical but what about those using Amazon or Ebay web services? I think these people would be interested in a similar SQL Server based solution for these services.

Is anyone familiar with DBAmp, www.forceamp.com? This is a tool for replicating and managing salesforce data. This uses xp_cmdShell to execute an external process to do its magic. Is this approach better is anyone's view?

Cheers

Rhys

I answer a lot of questions regarding SQLCLR on both the MSDN Forums and the SQLServerCentral Forums. Personally, I think a lot of stuff gets stuffed into SQLCLR that has no business in a SQL Server. Memory is one of the #1 issues that people have trouble with, and it generally has to do with AppDomains unloading because of Memory Pressure, and not just on 32 bit machines. Adjusting memory settings can usually fix the problem, but then that begs the question, why would I want to pull memory from my BPool to run a process that could be running elsewhere.

The biggest arguement that I get is that it needs to be a data driven process, and the data is changing in SQL. That almost seems like a valid argument until you consider that since .NET 2.0, the SqlDependency has existed, and this can easily be registered against a SQL Table, and Service Broker will trigger an event when the data in the table changes. This would make a much more robust solution in my opinion because the monitoring app is now not on the SQL Server, and the entire BCL can safely be used to build the app. Having SQLCLR to tell me that the SQL Server is down doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me. If SQL goes down, then so does your monitoring. I learned about this one first hand when I was using SQL Agent to call stored procedures to track my servers early on. It only took one crash to move to a different method.

Not to take away from the idea, I just think it is somewhat misplaced in its implementation. I think that unless you would have written a Xproc to do this kind of thing, you probably shouldn't be doing it in SQLCLR.

Comments from the following blog entry: http://209.251.180.21/site/archive/2008/11/sql-twitter-n00bs-sqlpass/

Comments from the following blog entry: http://www.pythian.com/news/1264/log-buffer-116-a-carnival-of-the-vanities-for-dbas/