This is an AWSOME book!
Written by Itzik Ben-Gan and coauthored by Lubor Kolar and Dejan Sarka it's definitly worth it's money.
It starts with the chapter on logical query processing in which it explaines the basics of the full select statement and the order of processing it.
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Well in my knowledge brush up for 70-431 Exam I used this book backed up by BOL.
If you have previous SQL Server experience this book and BOL is all you really need to pass the Exam.
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So as of today i'm a proud member of the MCP club :)
The exam wasn't that hard. I had 35 "Pick a correct answer" questions and 15 simulations.
The simulations threw me off a bit because i didn't expect them.
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This has been a debate for as long as i've known. How to pronounce SQL? ess-cue-el or sequel?
Each one has it's own supporters. But only one is correct.
And the winner is (drum-roll here):
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There's no such thing as a global variable in SQL Server.
You can't just do: DECLARE @@GlobalVar int
You can fake it with CONTEXT_INFO
but i wanted something that would last beyond a session or restart
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The most popular method of auditing data is with an AFTER DELETE, INSERT, UPDATE trigger.
But what happens if you have a Rollback statement in your trigger if some condition is met?
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This is something i assumed was common knowledge, but apparently it isn't.
If you want to have a method in your derived class with the same name as the one in the base class and the base class one isn't marked as virtual you can use the NEW keyword.
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I've written an article about Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) and it's published on SQLTeam.com
Multiple Active Result Sets is a new SQL Server 2005 feature that, putting it simply, allows the user to run more than one SQL batch on an open connection at the same time.
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We had an interesting discussion here about Katmai (the next SQL Server version)
Of course it was discussed in the latest MVP summit, but noone can say anything because it's all under NDA.
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I have written before about running Windows Forms GUI tests on a compiled application exe here.
And i must say that it works GREAT!
I had a few problems of which the most annoying was the Drag and Drop functionality.
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I just hate having nulls in my DateTime columns. Having them always mean you also have to handle them in some way in your app.
The most common way is something like this:
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MsSqlSystemResource is a database that complements the master db. It is like the name smartly imples a resource database.
All system stored procedures, views and functions are stored here.
This databse is by all means hidden from the user.
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A while ago i explained why do you need a [Flags] attribute on the Enum here.
We'll since then i was happy with my flags until i got to the point of having 16 flags.
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While searching for something in BOL i've accidently stumbled onto this little cool command line utility
TableDiff.exe is a table comparison tool that comes with the sql server.
It's installed on the server in the:
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NUnitForms is a pretty awsome tool for GUI unit testing.
However it lacks one major thing. You can't test a whole exe or dll.
For example if you have a MyTestApp.
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I use Yahoo's mail service since 1996. But today i doscovered a new thing that made me laugh for half an hour.
You have to use their ajax-ifed beta version. Click Compose and start clicking on the subject button.
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Since i've started playing with SQL Server 2005 i've come accross a few things that i think are very cool.
I write them here so i don't forget about them :))
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When doing apps that deals with date there almost always comes a question on how to store an incomplete date.
For example:
Person A is born on 1980-02-17.
Person B is born on 1980-02 <- The person doesn't know the exact day (This is acctually a real life scenario)
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I've seen this question pop up here, and i think it's usefull to post it here, since not every one reads the forums (you should! :))
We'll in this thread at the end of the first page there's a procedure on how to downgrade a db from SQL Server 2k5 to SQL server 2000.
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Ever missed a Prod(columnName) function that works like a sum but it multiplies the column values?
If you have then you probably know that there's a workaround using a bit of high school math knowledge about base 10 logarithms.
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