In the software development space, the occasional practice of making the source code, or a popular framework, open source is a great thing. This venerable tradition goes a long way in encouraging developers and providing them a strong foundation to begin with.
In a similar welcome development, the .NET 5 C# extension for Microsoft’s SQL Server has now been given open source status. C# is an extensively used programming language for developing robust and secure applications.
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This move comes after some other widely used languages namely Java, R and Python have already been released over the SQL Server platform. With this move, developers will now be able to use their existing SQL Server tables in conjunction with a C# application.
Now, users will be able to perform operations in C# and use the platform’s rich libraries to retrieve certain results, which can then be used as inputs for other downstream processes. This open sourcing brings C# workloads and data closer, giving rise to new opportunities.
Some of the anticipated advantages of open sourcing the .NET 5 C# include the ability to clean data. This will also accelerate data querying by embedding code written in C#, within the already stored procedures.
This in turn will take data logic deeper, right down to the database level. This is likely to improve the performance of applications by minimizing the movement of data. It will also reduce lag times, by reducing the need to retrieve data from SQL Server.
Developers will now be able to embed C# code right down to the database level. So, data will no longer have to be retrieved from the SQL Server to the application tier for each business logic processing or workload.
Lastly, the open sourcing of .NET 5 C# will enable more developers within the SQL Server community to develop even more extensions for this dynamic programming language. Let us hope this positive tradition of open sourcing language extensions goes on.
