Paging through result sets is a very common need in applications. It provides a convenient way to deliver small chunks of data to the client application, minimizing network traffic and allowing end users to browse data in page size format. There are different methods to accomplish the paging, both on client and server side. The […]
One of the most confusing topics for developers coming from traditional languages like C, C++, Java, C#, and VB to SQL, is the evaluation of predicates. In most languages predicate logic is evaluated left to right. SQL is a different story. It follows the concept of all-at-once operations. This means all logical predicates will be […]
With SQL Server 2008 just released, there is a lot of interest of what it offers. On Friday, September 12, you can hear about all the new features of SQL Server 2008 in a full day of free training brought to you by JSSUG, Idea Integration and Pragmatic Works. Each session will dive deeply into […]
On August 23, 2008 is the Jax Code Camp IV in Jacksonville. A full day of coding and free training on different technologies: WCF, LINQ, Cold Fusion, Flex/Air, Silverlight, Ruby on Rails, .Net Compact Framework, SharePoint, SQL Server 2008, and more. To sign up and see the full schedule visit the Code Camp website at […]
Handling division by zero is a common need in SQL queries. Here is the standard way of performing a check if divisor is zero using the CASE function. — Sample tableCREATE TABLE Foo ( keycol INT PRIMARY KEY, x INT, y INT); INSERT INTO Foo VALUES(1, 15, 3), (2, 10, 0); — Using CASE to check divisor for zeroSELECT keycol, […]
As SQL Server 2008 is getting in the advances phases of release, a lot has been published about new features and changes. There have been a few enhancements to Transact SQL that will be a great help for both developers and administrators. Here is list of the top 10 in no particular order, with links […]
SQL Server 2008 adds new spatial data types and methods for storing and handling spatial data. The two new data types are GEOMETRY and GEOGRAPHY. This new functionality provides great capabilities to process spatial data. Here is one brief example to demonstrate the GEOGRAPHY data type and one of the related methods. The code below […]
The new FILESTREAM data type in SQL Server 2008 offers a new way of storing unstructured data (images, documents, video, etc.). Up until now the two standard ways to store such data have been either in the database as BLOB objects or as files outside of the database. FILESTREAM provides the best of both worlds, […]
SQL Server 2008 introduces enhancements to the existing date and time data types. The most important changes are the addition of separate DATE and TIME data types. The DATETIME2 data type adds more precision to the existing DATETIME data type, and DATETIMEOFFSET provides support for time zones. Here is a list of the new data […]
Graphs, tree algorithms and structures have been used for long time in databases to solve hierarchy related problems. Adjacency list, nested sets, materialized path, and other hybrid methods offer different capabilities to help. SQL Server 2008 adds a new feature to help with modeling hierarchical relationships: the HIERARCHYID data type. It provides compact storage and […]