> The EF (including EF4 IMHO) and sidelining of L2SQL has emphasized a great wallowing "data munging" hole in NET.
>
>Are you familiar with the new data and data persistence capabilities in SQL Server 2008 R2 and PowerPivot?

Kevin, any link to that? I'd be interested to learn about the topic.

I've been trying to do some datamunging in SQL2000, but is really very difficult and cumbersome as TSQL does not have the effective tools to do that. Sure you'd could argue that things in SQL2005 and SQL2008 have changed things dramatically, but typically the choice over the SQL backend is made by the clients. The majority of my clients are still on SQL2000 with close to half on 2005. None of them (as far as I'm aware is on 2008 yet).

For a business decision it currently is a no no to go SQL2008 for its data munging qualities.

Also, I believe in the ideology that datamunging does not belong on a server. With large numbers of users you're burdening the server with doing the datamunging while the it should be busy with just retrieving data. Data munging should be done by the business objects or data objects layer IMO.

Walter,