(Graham Parker) Knowing how and where to store things is bread and butter stuff for an Application Developer. Applications need to store state information, options, user settings, configuration information, connection strings, their data, system information and much more. Choosing where to store thi
Other News
Better Predictions Using Unstructured Data in Mixed-Data Modeling
(Mike Meyer) Just about every business has a need to predict or to understand specific aspects of consumer behavior. Financial institutions want to know about the risk of default or bankruptcy; cell phone operators need to understand attrition and churn; grocers want to know the likelihood that a pa
Dimensions are Not Entities, or Why Data Structures Aren’t Equal
(Todd Shraml) It takes some mental adjusting to adapt to data warehousing methods of data structure design. Both first-time data warehousers and experienced folks, who have kept their noses a little too close to that proverbial grindstone, can run into problems when attempting a query against a lone
Adobe FrameMaker 7.1
(Brian Barbash) XML’s surface-level simplicity hides a deceptively complex beast. At first glance, creating an XML document does not take a lot of effort. Create some tags, ensure they are well-formed, and that’s it. Throw in a DTD or Schema and now there are a set of rules against which the documen
The Road to DB2 Application Developer Certification
(Howard Fosdick) Among the DB2 certifications, the Certified Application Developer credential stands alone; it’s the only test in the series oriented toward database programming. Other DB2 credentials are oriented toward DBAs or systems, so application developers will want to set off on the Certifie
Keeping QA Up To Date – Part 2
(Steve Jones) In the first article in this series I looked at the basic process for keeping your QA machine up to date. Here I’ll delve further into the first step in this process, getting the latest backup from your production machine. (R)
Using Performance Monitor To Identify SQL Server Hardware Bottlenecks
(Brad M. McGehee) The best place to start your SQL Server performance audit is to begin with the Performance Monitor (System Monitor). By monitoring a few key counters over a 24 hour period, you should get a pretty good feel for any major hardware bottlenecks your SQL Server is experiencing.
Say hello to XMPP
(Nathan Willis) The Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) is the formalized incarnation of the Jabber instant message protocol. But what exactly does that formalization mean? And why should you care?
Secrets to Successful SQL Server Programming
(Buck Woody) In this article, I’ll cover what you need to learn to program using SQL Server. Some of the concepts I’ve mentioned before, but in this article I’ll bring them all together, along with the other processes and procedures that you’ll need to understand to create effective programs. You
Oracle and Availability: Illustrated Downtime Scenarios (Sample Chapter)
(Matthew Hart and Scott Jesse) As you have already discovered, or perhaps are about to discover, maintaining the high-availability database is a tricky prospect. There are hundreds of possible sources of downtime hiding in the crooks and crannies of your enterprise. Many outage situations cascade in