I love designing websites, applications, recording music and video, and coming up with new ideas. I'm a big gadget nerd. My skills are in business software development (VB/ASP/ADO.NET) and website design (D/XHTML, CSS, JS, PHP, MySQL).
Currently working on a bunch of webOS applications. RMX Apps delivers high-quality apps for Palm's webOS family of smartphones (currently the Pre and the Pixi).
So for my main gig for the past year I’ve been developing some custom software for a construction contractor in the Milwaukee area. In order to keep the project costs down, I opted to develop the software in VB.NET (arguably the quickest development platform) and use a MySQL database.
Last weekend I was working on modifying some tables and the whole dataset just got detached from the project somehow. All the tables and queries still existed, but Visual Studio was not seeing them. Since I don’t know everything there is to know about ADO.NET and how datasets work in Visual Studio, it took me hours to get everything back to normal. I have a hunch that it was a problem with the MySQL NET Connector that I’m using to get VS to talk to the database. A few other people were reporting the same vague “Corrupt Memory” errors on various support forums online.
This whole event got me thinking how this wouldn’t have happened if we used SQL Server in the first place. To make things more interesting, it turns out that this company actually has a SQL Server license (it came bundled with Small Business Server). The main reason why we avoided it is now moot. I’m coming up to a turning point where I will be releasing a major version of the software with a plethora of updates. I’m wondering if now is the time to migrate our MySQL data (which is in desperate need of optimization anyway) over to SQL Server.
This obviously requires a lot of consideration as I definitely prefer MySQL as a whole to SQL Server, but if it can prevent the hair-pulling frustration of last weekend, it might be worth a switch.
