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June, 2006
In
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Hierarchical Queries by Howard J. Rogers A hierarchical query allows you to trace or ‘walk’ the relationship between rows in the same table -which, as an explanation, is pretty accurate but probably doesn’t enlighten you very much! So let me cite a specific example in the hope that the specifics will explain things a bit better!
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A Few SQL Tips and Techniques Here is a neat trick that you can use when you are dealing with days of the week. Assume that you have a table containing transactions, or some other type of interesting facts. The table has a CHAR(3) column containing the name of the day on which the transaction happened; let’s call this column DAY_NAME. So, in this column the only valid values are as follows: SUN, MON, TUE, WED, THU, FRI, SAT. Now, let’s further assume that we need to query this table and have the results returned in order by the day of the week. Just like the calendar, though, we want Sunday first, followed by Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and so on. How can this be done?
Click here
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Surveying Your Application Needs As a product manager for Oracle Application Express (formerly Oracle HTML DB), I often want to gather feedback on workshops or training sessions I deliver. Using Oracle Application Express to quickly create surveys has proven to be so useful that I figured I'd write about it. Even though this column discusses a survey I'd use for one of my sessions, you could just as easily use 10 questions of your own. Using Oracle Application Express to create, deploy, and compile results for a survey is a natural fit, because the surveys are often needed quite quickly, distribution and access via the Web offer convenience, and results are stored in an Oracle database for easy analysis. Click here for the article.
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Oracle and SQL Server Interoperability - Part 3 In part 1 and part 2 of my series on Oracle and SQL Server interoperability, I talked about some subtle differences between Oracle and SQL Server and some of Oracle drivers available. In this article, I will talk about a new tool that comes with Oracle 10g, Oracle Instant Client. Prior to Oracle 10g, to establish connection to your Oracle databases, you have to install the full Oracle client to get proper Oracle driver loaded on your server or PC. The full client is bloated and pretty big in size and makes quite a few modifications to the registry. In reality, all you need is relevant dlls and some config files to establish a connection to your Oracle server. This is especially true for your server application, because you do not want too many bloated stuff on a production server. The simplest solution is usually the best solution. Click here for the article.
Working with GUIDs in SQL Server The GUID is a wide column (16 bytes to be specific) and contains a unique combination of 33 hex value characters. This column, because it is the primary key, is going to be stored in, of course, the clustered index (unless specified to be a non- clustered index), and will be the page pointer for each leaf page in a non-clustered index. Also, if a GUID is used instead of an integer identity column then the bits need to be matched up for each row, which is relatively fast. If a high volume of inserts are done on these tables then GUID's being large will contribute to page splits, as will the fact that the NEWID() function generates a random GUID value, which could place the new record on any of the data pages for this table and could cause performance problems. Another reason is that typically primary keys are searched most frequently and trying to recall a GUID from memory to type into a query is not probable. If you needed a key that
would be unique across all servers I would recommend a composite key as the PK
instead of the GUID. Use a single integer identity column to uniquely identify
the rows and another column to identify the server, placing a default server id
value and placing a check constraint on the server id column to validate that
the value is only what you would expect for it to be for that server.
Click here for the article.
In A Nutshell
Interested in learning more tips and techniques for SQL Server? "In A Nutshell"
is what you are looking for. Kevin Kline,
author of O'Reilly's "SQL in a Nutshell" and "Transact-SQL Programming" and President of The Professional Association for SQL Server,
offers tips, techniques and much more. Updated numerous times a week,
there is always valuable material to be had!
Click
here
to see what Kevin is up to in the SQL Server world. | ||||||||||||||||
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Risk refers to future conditions or circumstances that exist, outside of the control of the project team, that will have an adverse impact on the project if they occur. Whereas an issue is a current problem that must be dealt with, a risk is a potential future problem that has not yet occurred. Once risks have been identified, there are a number of options that the project manager should consider for responses.
Click
here for more information on
finding the right technique to manage risk. | ||||||||||||||||
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Interactive Crossword
Puzzle: "Superman"
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