(Peter Zaitsev) Looking at how people are using COUNT(*) and COUNT(col) it looks like most of them think they are synonyms and just using what they happen to like, while there is substantial difference in performance and even query result.
Other News
The five flavors of DB2
(Curt Monash) I asked Jeff Jones of IBM to explain the various DB2 code lines to me. His answer was so clear that I asked further permission to post it verbatim. Here it is. The main takeaway is that one shouldn’t confuse the shared-everything z/OS (mainframe) version with the more loosely-coupled U
Example corrupt database to play with and some backup/restore things to try
(Paul Randal) I’ve been asked several times over the last few weeks for an example corrupt database to play with, and for testing logic built around DBCC CHECKDB.
Why you should never ever copy code – An example of complete chaos
(Jeroen van Wilgenburg) It seems innocent, a few lines of code used twice in the same application. But before you know know it those lines appear 272 times in your application! You guessed it right and you’re probably wondering how could that happen. I’ll try to explain what happened and how to prev
REXML: Proccessing XML in Ruby
(Dominic Da Silva) In this day and age of software development, it is inevitable that you will need to process XML or produce XML within your application. If your language of choice is Ruby, or Rails for that matter, there is a very simple and useful XML processing API for Ruby called REXML. REXML i
A Developer’s Guide to the MySQL User’s Conference
(Jay Pipes) Robin Schumacher recently gave us an excellent rundown on sessions at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo (April 23-26th in Santa Clara) for DBAs. As a proud developer I wanted to make sure that our enormous developer community had a similar guide. Now, developers will encounter the s
Working with TreeView Controls
(Scott Lysle) This is a short article addressing some of the basics of working with a TreeView control; the article will address dynamically adding TreeNodes to a TreeView control, searching the nodes to find and highlight a single node or a collection of nodes matching a search term against the Tre
Oracle updates leave critical Windows flaw
(Robert McMillan) Some Oracle customers using the Windows operating system will have to wait another two weeks to receive a critical software update to their database software, thanks to a glitch that came up in testing the company’s latest patches.
XSD Tutorial – Part 3 of 5 – Extending Existing Types
(Simon Sprott) It is often useful to be able to take the definition for an existing entity, and extend it to add more specific information. In most development languages, we would call this inheritance or sub classing. The same concepts also exist in the XSD standard. This allows us to take an exist
Workaround for the SQL DISTINCT Clause
(Srinath MS) The SQL DISTINCT clause isn’t case sensitive, which means that your query might end up pulling records with different cases.