Oslo becomes SQL Server Modeling - my 2 cents

Here are my two cents why I am disappointed by Microsoft's decision to change Oslo to SQL Server Modeling. In this eWeek article Doug Purdy is being quoted as follows:

"The great irony to all these (negativ, ed.) comments is that all we did was change the name from 'Oslo' to ... SQL Server Modeling and now we get the #fail tag. If we had called it Windows Modeling or .NET Modeling would it have been #success?"

When I saw Oslo and M, I was always disturbed by the focus on SQL Server integration. I always wondered, why, during talks and demos, the SQL Server aspect was emphasized. Sure, a scalable repository is good and useful. But I always considered it only one option of storing models, basically a "persistence backend" of the nice and cool DSL facilities. I hoped MS would keep the DSL infrastructure indepedent of SQL Server.

This most recent move changes the picture. Now Oslo is basically an API for SQL Server. SQL Server is not merely one of many persistence backends but rather the reason why M & Co exist. And consequently, future decisions in M & Co will be driven by the data community and not by the needs of the DSL community.

So yes, I am somewhat disappointed. Oslo will probably still be a cool and useful tool for data modeling and programming on the SQL server. But it has lost its appeal to me as a general purpuse DSL tooling (at least until I get convinced otherwise :-))  permalink