(Arup Nanda) Lora, the DBA at Acme Bank, is at the center of attention in a high-profile meeting of the bank’s top management team. The objective is to identify ways of enabling end users to slice and dice the data in the company’s main data warehouse. At the meeting, one idea presented is to create
Other News
Store Integers as Decimal Data Type
(Brian Moran) I need to store integers—account numbers and other IDs—that have 20 or more digits. Storage and retrieval of these integers needs to be accurate, with no rounding, so I can’t use the float data type. I’ve seen recommendations to others in this situation to store the integers in a CHAR(
DTS Parallel Processing
(Leo Peysakhovich) Recently I faced a task, as a part of regular maintenance, to rebuild all the indexes in the databases. Nothing special, but that instance of SQL Server has anywhere between 200 and 400 databases. Each of them is fairly small but it takes hours to rebuild indexes manually or even
DB2 parallel operations and query performance
(Eric Garrigue Vesely) Parallelism can be employed in static and dynamic queries, local and remote data access, queries using single table scans and multi-table joins, access via an index or table scan, or list prefetch, sort, and inserts. Most parallel operations can be used on either partitioned o
Oracle/PLSQL: Sequences (Autonumber)
In Oracle, you can create an autonumber field by using sequences. A sequence is an object in Oracle that is used to generate a number sequence. This can be useful when you need to create a unique number to act as a primary key.
Automated Selection of Materialized Views and Indexes for SQL Databases
(Sanjay Agrawal, Surajit Chaudhuri and Vivek Narasayya) Automatically selecting an appropriate set of materialized views and indexes for SQL databases is a non-trivial task. A judicious choice must be cost-driven and influenced by the workload experienced by the system. Although there has been
Document Management, Using WebSphere Portal V5.0.2 and DB2 Content Manager V8.2
(John Ganci) This IBM Redbook and sample code provide IT architects, IT specialists, and developers with the critical knowledge to design, develop, deploy and manage a portal based document management system using IBM WebSphere Portal V5.0.2 and IBM DB2 Content Manager V8.2. (pdf)
Introducing GRML
(Toby Jacob Rhodes) GRML is a markup language for browsing the web. It has the data definition features of character-delimited files and XML, with the hyperlinking and form support of HTML. The purpose of this article is to show why GRML exists and how it complements HTML, XML, RSS, and characte
Introducing GRML
(Toby Jacob Rhodes) GRML is a markup language for browsing the web. It has the data definition features of character-delimited files and XML, with the hyperlinking and form support of HTML. The purpose of this article is to show why GRML exists and how it complements HTML, XML, RSS, and characte
Building Plugins with C# Part 2: Making Additions with XML
(Nathan Good) This article focuses on two tasks. First, I’ll add a new plug-in, which uses an XML file to find valid users. Second, I’ll add a new configuration section handler to the simple UI testing program, to be used for loading the plug-ins when the application starts up.