The need to evaluate an expression at runtime is an old one and has been addressed many different ways. Today Gilles writes with links to many of the current tools or examples available on the web. Gilles writes: That’s a common question but not a so simple one! 🙂 In short you have to use a lexer and a parser, […]

Yesterday I introduced the concept of evaluating a mathematical expression using a C# technique that converts the string to values and operations that can be performed. The code that performs the calculation uses expressions in the form of postfix notation (sometimes called Polish Notation) simplifying the calculation process. One difficulty is that we are taught to write equations using infix […]

C# does not have a method evaluate the results of a mathematical expression contained in a string. If it did, it would be similar to evaluating a formula you might enter in a cell in a spreadsheet. When the contents of the cell are evaluated, the contents are translated into a series of math variables and operations that can be […]

Placing your SQL Server files in Azure Blob Storage is a new feature released in SQL Server 2014. Why would you consider using this service. Fast access to files is commonly an essential performance requirement for databases; that’s why we most often use SAN storage for the speed it provides. It turns out there are two different ways you can […]

What is your preferred role when working with databases? Do you want to be the guru with all the different techniques for database design and optimization. Do you want to be the optimization wizard able to get the right set of indexes or optimize query performance? Do you want to be the database manager making sure people have only the […]

Yesterday I presented a case for not storing BLOB data in SQL Server. Dave Shared in the comments an good case against my generalized position against using blobs. His primary concern was the sprawl of files by storing each instance of BLOB data as a separate file. His product was a self-contained image management tool. By using SQL Server as […]

Today I want to return to the topic of FileStream and other BLOB (Binary Large Object) data types storage in SQL Server with the exception of XML. Let me start with a near dogmatic statement that BLOB data doesn’t belong in a relational database; especially when there is a lot of it. Let me provide a few reasons why. Using […]

Recently I received an inquiry regarding the use of SQL Server FileStreams. The database was designed on one machine, and restoring to a new machine made it difficult to get the file streams to work again. If you follow this link to Microsoft they provide an overview of what a filestream data type is and how it is implemented. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb933993%28v=sql.105%29.aspx […]

User Defined Table Types have been in SQL Server since 2008. They are mostly used to pass sets of data into a stored procedure. You create the user defined table type first in a database. Then you can populate the type from your client application or another SQL Server object. That table, defined as your own table type, may then […]

Have you found an opportunity to use Sequences in SQL Server Yet? Sequences can be very powerful when implementing a type/subtype database pattern. Using a type/Subtype pattern you may have a number of tables that have similar characteristics. For example, you could have a number of different tables representing a person. You could have people tables like Employee, Sales Representative, […]