Many years ago I worked on a project converting a Windows application into a web site. One of the interesting things about the project was the aspect of reporting. The original windows application used Crystal Reports for reporting. It was bundled with Visual Studio, and freely distributed. We used Chrystal Reports in our Proof of Concept web site, and found […]

Where would we be without ODBC and JDBC? I can guarantee you that life would be much harder today without them. I really liked the idea of ODBC when it was first introduced by Microsoft. It was based on the old COM technology, and was one of the first frameworks that wrapped a standardized SQL syntax around many different data […]

As a follow on editorial for database security, I was reminded that the needs of ORM tools may be a little bit different than database access you control yourself. One of the comments addressed Entity Framework (EF) specifically because it assures your database schema is synchronized with the code being executed. When software using EF first connects to a database […]

What’s the first thing you should do when you create a new database for a corporate environment? Remove all accounts from the DBA Schema, and create an Application account pointing to another schema. There may be other databases other than those hosted in a corporate environment, depending on the required security and authentication mechanism. That’s a pretty strong statement. So […]

I’m spoiled when it comes to working with SQL relational databases. I say spoiled because it is quite amazing how transportable the SQL language is. When you have learned the basics of the SQL Language you can apply it to just about any implementation of an SQL Engine due to the tendency to adopt ANSI standards in the implementation of […]

Making your own code follow the concepts of an ACID transaction is not all that fun. I’ve been playing with an in memory engine where portions of the data in the memory is modified frequently throughout the data. It takes quite a while to startup a new instance of the engine if you read the objects from source application. So, […]

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the incorporation of JSON into SQL Server. At first I see it as a technology to be abused. I can’t tell you how many stored procedures I have seen that had a single input parameter as an XML variable when XML was introduced to SQL Server. It was very popular in some circles […]

When space is an issue, something that doesn’t happen very often, we can optimize storage by taking advantage of bits instead of using an entire byte to store a value. In fact, depending on the number of values needed for a specific tuple, you can break up a byte into multiple values. If you had 8 bool values they could […]

I’m working on an application that uses a Dot Net FlagsAttribute class implementation for enumerated values. It works like this. You create an Enumeration using values with details having values assigned as sequential powers of 2. Enum colors { Black = 1, Blue = 2, Green = 4, } With this enumeration each item is unique. The difference is that […]

SQL Server can optimize the logic of your queries resulting in a better execution plan which you may not have considered. I wanted to prove that the AND operation in TSQL is the equivalent of the && operation found in C#. When you compare two Boolean values to determine if both are true you combine the two values using &&. […]