blogs.conchango.com

First of all I'd like to assure non-developers accidentally reading this post that it has nothing to do with lysergic acid diethylamide, an A-class substance commonly known as LSD or ''acid''. It's all about ACID properties of database transactions in general (boring stuff), and the ''I'' property and scalability in particular. Now that we ...

SQL Server 2008 is upon us and if there is one feature about which I am somewhat excited (sad geek, I know) is the plethora of new data types designed purely to store dates and times. To explain the reasons for this excitement let me just list the problems with existing SQL types. The first major issue is that of resolution: Smalldatetime has ...

So I just got back from TechEd Barcelona, and I had a great conference in no small part due to the people I went with: Merrick Chaffer, James Dawson and Paul McMillan. This is a selection of some of Conchango's finest from the world of .Net development, infrastructure and SQL Server. One of the reasons the conference was so much more enjoyable ...

For my current project I have inherited a couple of customized RMO applications. They help to create the merge publication, publication snapshots, subscribers, subscribers snapshot and synchronization sessions.  When it became time to use the application on a Windows 2003 64 bit server I came across a couple of issues when trying to ...

I’ve just gone through an informal and limited evaluation process for a charting tool for a BI dashboard.  It included some of the RS extension products, ProClarity and ChartFX.  Of course I would have been keen to use ProClarity, but in this case the cost was a little high and, to be honest, it would have been a sledgehammer to ...

I wrote an article for the September 2006 issue of SQL Server Standard magazine:   The version that was finally published was a very cut down version with minimal code snippets.  This was for obvious reasons; they had to fit the content onto small columns in the magazine.  For the readers who would prefer the more verbose ...

 I’ve seen a few Conchango developers in the past use sp_xml_preparedocument and OPENXML to commit a serialized collection object to the database.  We can do this in SQL Server 2000 and it avoids a round trip to the database for each collection member.  This can mean a huge performance improvement.  Imagine having to call ...

A colleague of mine once asked me to do a “Number of Days since Last Incident” calculated measure (sounds like fun!).  Basically, he had a measure called Incidents and wanted a running count of days since the last incident. E.g.Date        Incidents        ...

I am naturally interested in MDX stored procs so I tried them out.  I have often wondered how they compare to SQL CLR.  I hereby commit myself to (trying to) do a few blog posts in this space!  Here are some findings regarding when to use them.It is well known that the strengths of SQL CLR for real-life scenarios are as ...

There is some literature out there that says it is possible to impersonate the current user’s logon for external access (file system, registry, etc.) in SQL/CLR sprocs, but not much in the way of sample code.  As I have crossed this bridge, I thought I should share the knowledge.  This now works with assemblies catalogued as ...