How do you refer to …?

I was writing slides and labs last week. I read Dare’s discussion of “The Sex and Cash theory“ about doing what you think is cool vs doing what you do for cash (work) that may not be as “sexy“. Didn’t feel so bad after that. My discussions with others revolved around the “official” words and terminolgy for various SQL Server 2005-related items.


SQL Server Management Studio – its too long to fit on a slide. The obvious acronym (SMS) is already “taken” and would be confusing. Then I saw SSMS as an acronym posted on a newsgroup. Cool acronym. Done.


Did you also notice the suffixes for SQL Server Management Studio projects? They absolutely win the aware for longest Windows file suffix ever. “MyProject.ssmssln is for the solution file“ and “MyProject.ssmssqlproj“ for the file that lists the subfiles in a project. Wow. Well the file associations work and I guess we’ve gone way past 8.3 names.


SQL Server’s native XML data type – I refer to this everywhere as the “XML data type” . An XML aficionado pointed out that I am preempting  a term usually used to refer to XML types defined in an XML schema and that I should cease and desist. So I did a little research.


The SQL Server 2005 Books Online refers to it as “xml data type”, but with a lower-case “xml”. Michael Rys, the PM of the SQL Server XML group refers to it in his “XQuery From The Experts“ book chapter on an XML native data type in a SQL database as “XML datatype”. Upper case XML. Another database vendor refers to it as XMLType. Couldn’t find it in the ANSI-SQL 2003 spec, part 14 at all (it’s mainly about mapping). And the ANSI-SQL 2003 spec refers to types defined in an XML Schema as “XML Schema Data Types”, not XML data type at all.


“XML folks“ don’t usually like to see the acronym XML in small letters and “SQL folks“ have a convention of capitalizing SQL keywords and data types, they might be offended if it is in lower case. XML is now a T-SQL keyword. Oh well…In the end, I decided to stick with I have. And now I use the term “XML Schema Data Types”. If you ever read anything on this subject that I’ve written, now you’ll know what I mean.

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