(Edd Dumbill) The vacation season has brought renewed vigor in discussion among XML developers. A recent thread about validation illustrated one of the most useful properties of XML-DEV as a community: technical discussions often evolve to encompass the wider context of practice in which they are re
Other News
Programs vs. Utilities Revisited
(Jim Ruddy) Some applications periodically need to delete a significant percentage of records. With the high availability requirements typical of today’s applications, making data unavailable or restricting it to read-only during the DELETE process isn’t an option. In my earlier column, I described
How To Use OLE DB DBTYPE_VARNUMERIC
When you use OLE DB with databases that support very large numeric types (for example, Oracle’s NUMBER data type which supports up to 38 digits), OLE DB returns DBTYPE_VARNUMERIC as the column’s data type. These large numbers can be stored and retrieved by using the OLE DB DB_VARNUMERIC structure, w
DB2 database design and principles of peak performance
(Fred Whitlark) The purpose of this article is to provide IBM business partners with important information about DB2 database performance in a DB2 Universal Database (UDB) for z/OS (hereafter simply referred to as DB2) environment. This article attempts to consolidate material from multiple sources,
Integrating XML
(Gary Kupecz) The way XML has been positioned over the last several years – namely, as some type of savior for companies that have invested in myriad systems with numerous incompatible data types – it makes you wonder why organizations aren’t adopting any XML solution they can get their hands on.
MSSQL Server 2000 Reporting Services: Master Chart Reports: Pie Charts in Reporting Services
(William Pearson) In this article, we will begin our exploration of chart reports with an examination of the humble pie chart. While virtually all of us have interacted with these kinds of charts before, (if not in the context of report authoring, then almost certainly as an information consumer), w
Fixing broken logins and transferring passwords
(Neil Boyle) When transferring a database to a new server using backup/restore or detaching and re-attaching database files, the link between server logins and database users almost invariably gets broken. Here we will take a look at why this happens, and what we can do to fix it. (R)
IBM, Microsoft and Oracle Tailor Middleware to RFID
(Jacqueline Emigh) IBM, its partners and some big-name users are piloting unannounced additions to the WebSphere product lineup. One set of future components will be tailored to RFID across government, industrial and retail applications. Another will be fine-tuned for use in the retail supply chain,
Automate the Sizing of your SGA in Oracle 10g
(James Koopmann) Simply stated, the system global area (SGA) is just shared memory structures that are created at instance startup, hold information about the instance and control its behavior. The following table gives a brief synopsis of the particular components of the SGA, the variables that con
Fuzzy Lookup and Fuzzy Grouping in Data Transformation Services for SQL Server 2005
(Surajit Chaudhuri, Kris Ganjam, Venky Ganti, Vivek Narasayya, and Theodore Vassilakis) This paper describes the Fuzzy Lookup transformation and Fuzzy Grouping transformation in Data Transformation Services (DTS) for SQL Server 2005. Fuzzy Grouping transformations are useful for improving data quali