I'm also sure. At least for mobile devices. I can't speak to desktop Chrome. That's why it does the same weird rendering Safari does which has become more noticeable since the split from webkit.
I would have agreed until this last round of "we changed it, you'll like it, and we won't change it back" has my group looking for a different league host for the first time.
You might look into partitioning. Oracle and SQL Server both support that type of operation. Additionally, being able to find support when things get "too big to handle" can be easier on a mature technology with lots of users.
On a side note, you can hook a Hadoop cluster up to SQL Server if you're into that kind of thing for storage.
And we would all like to thank you for your continued " I have opinion x and don't change it when confronted with new information" contribution of showing issues with the programmer and instead of the language.
I am a database guy. Typically I'm against XML (especially in a database) however, I have a scenario where there is a test system and there are some standard bits of information (test description, stats, etc.) that all the tests have but they all come out in a different structure meaning: I have 4500 queries that test different aspects of our data-set and they all come out with different columns.
They have different columns because it deals with about 600 different tables and the output is what is relevant to the test. I have decided that in this instance, I want to capture all of the results in a single table so that they are centralized. XML solves this issue for me. I can grab the results in XML, and insert them into a centralized table where they can be reviewed later.
TL;DR XML can solve some data structure issues where you don't always know the final output until it shows up.
I 100% disagree with you. How is having even more conditions in the where clause helpful? It makes it very easy to accidentally cross join (Oops, I forgot to actually join that table because I have 40 lines in my where clause).
Also, I believe that in SQL Server, the old (ANSI 89) style of joining (joining in the where clause) was deprecated and isn't optimized anymore so you'll get crap performance because all of the tables are actually cross joined before the filtering happens. The explicit join forces relationships to be accounted for first which can help keep the amount of memory needed down.
One last thing, how long does it take to adapt a new standard? The explicit join has been the standard since 1992.
I don't know that the solution to "programmers are lazy" and databases are hard is for them to learn a niche concept instead of taking the time to actually learn about data storage or, find someone who knows it well and work with them.
Are you married? If so I'm surprised if you've never gotten the "OMG I THINK I LEFT MY HAIR STRAIGHTENER ON AND I'M SURE THE HOUSE IS BURNING DOWN. Can you go check?" phone call. (Which, incidentally, has resulted in several hours of lost time at work but no still no sighting of the wild forgotten-plugged-in-hair-straightener)
Actually, I really like UML; I especially like swimlanes. Of course it doesn't make sense for every design but I find that 12 months later, a map to what I was thinking during the original design is invaluable.