(Micah Dubinko) As a fundamental part of the Web, hypertext linking has been the subject of repeated attempts at standardization beyond the basic format allowed in simple HTML. Such attempts can be characterized as efforts to balance machine processing ability with authoring convenience. The lat
Other News
Generate External Tables from an Excel Spreadsheet Using Apache Jakarta POI
(Casimir Santeros) The scenario: You receive an email with an attached Excel spreadsheet from your manager. Your task? Get the data in the spreadsheet loaded into the company Oracle 9i/10g database. How will you proceed? Will you write a custom application to load the data? Will you use the SQL*Load
A quick introduction to the Next Generation Installer for IBM Informix Products
(Sundar Shunmugam) The new installer for IBM Informix Products provides a uniform look and feel across various UNIX and Linux platforms. This article describes the changes to the installer for IBM Informix Dynamic Server, Version 10.0 in terms of product size, setup requirements, and error reporting
Exception Handling Best Practices in .NET
“My software never fails”. Can you believe it? I’m almost hearing you all, screaming that I’m a liar. “Software that never fails is something near to impossible!” Contrary to common belief, creating reliable, robust software is not something near to impossible. Notice that I’m not referring to bu
The DataSet Grows Up in ADO.NET 2.0 – Part 1
(Alex Homer) Version 1.0 of the .NET Framework introduced a completely new approach to handling relational data, by separating out the two basics functions of all data access application requirements into separate classes that are optimized for each specific task. For applications that just need
Introducing a New Data Grid
(Matthew MacDonald) The first two releases of the .NET Framework (.NET 1.0 and .NET 1.1) left a glaring gap in the data-binding picture. Although developers had a flexible, configurable model for linking almost any control to almost any data source, they didn’t have a practical way to display full t
Getting Started with XQuery
(Bob DuCharme) Although the W3C’s XQuery language for querying XML data sources is still in Working Draft status, the recent XML 2004 conference showed that there’s already plenty of interest and many implementations. While the Saxon implementation may not scale up as much as the disk-based versions
Room with a Better View
(Arup Nanda) Users at Acme Bank were complaining that typical and repeated queries were taking too long to execute. Because these queries are executed over and over by many users, any improvement in response time is bound to help.
User Views
(David Buelke and Stuart Litel) Integration is a basic requirement for corporations around the world. But technology integration means many things to different people, and it can be carried out at countless levels, including operating system, application process, and database or element. So, it’s no
New HTTP Endpoints Create SQL Server 2005 Web Services
(Peter DeBetta) SQL Server 2000 offers some capabilities for returning XML output via HTTP using SQLXML—and, of course, SQLXML supports Web services creation. Although not rocket science, setting up, configuring, and using Web services in SQL Server 2000 does require a little effort (see the SQLXML