(James Koopmann) I am often questioned about how I became a DBA and the road I traveled. This can be a very valid question because there are many DBA-want-to-bees that just do not know where to start. In the early years, many positions just fell into my lap, as there was a boom in the industry. This
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XML 2004 Conference and Exposition
The XML 2004 conference program provides the most comprehensive and customized education to maximize your time and further develop your XML techniques. Learn how to make the most of the industry’s popular tools and applications, hear about innovative solutions, and broaden your general knowledge. Yo
Formatting Report Output in Oracle HTML DB Using Report Templates
(Raj Mattamal) In HTML DB, the layout of data displayed in report regions is ultimately controlled by report templates. In addition to facilitating basic formatting, however, report templates in HTML DB give application developers the opportunity to reference the data in a current row while determin
Handling Package Security in DTS
To view, edit, protect, schedule, and run Data Transformation Services (DTS) packages on your network, you need to understand issues that affect package access, permissions, and connections.
Building VoiceXML Dialogs
(Jeff Kusnitz & Dr. Bruce Lucas) Until fairly recently, the web has primarily delivered information and services using visual interfaces, on computers equipped with displays, keyboards, and pointing devices. The web revolution had largely bypassed the huge market of customers of information and
Automated Tree Drawing: XSLT and SVG
(Jirka Kosek) Trees are a very basic abstraction used in many computer science areas, including XML. If you’re writing a document about tree structures you’ll often want to show trees as graphics. This is not a problem for a few trees as they can be hand drawn in some graphics editor. But if you nee
How to Multiply Column Values in SQL Server
(Vinod Kumar) We had a recent discussion on the public newsgroups on how to get this requirement in a single statement without using T-SQL. I was indeed taken by surprise how this requirement was answered by fellow MVP’s. Infact there is a solution even though no so elegant, but works great having s
Keeping Up With DB2
(Howard Fosdick) IBM releases new versions of DB2 every couple of years, so I get a lot of questions about how new DB2 versions should influence a DBA’s certification plan. Does it make more sense to certify with version 7 or version 8? If you’ve already passed the exam DB2 UDB v.7.1 Family Fundamen
Is all code really code? One question from an interview
(Andy Warren) When we hire new employees (at my day job) we start with a phone interview. I’ve got a list of a couple dozen questions we run through that give us an idea of whether we should consider bringing the person in for a more in depth interview. While a discussion of those questions is proba
SQL Building Blocks and Server Settings
(Deac Lancaster) Microsoft SQL Server 2000 has a large number of built-in functions available for SQL programming, database administration and other purposes. The major categories are listed in the table in this article.