My Tool List (Monday, October 26, 2009) - One of the more popular thing's Scott Hanselman has done is maintain a tool List, essentially a list of applications and utilities that he's found useful. There are plenty of absolute gems in his list and rather than present my own I'd be very comfortable just pointing you to his... But what fun would that be? None! I also think there are a few more that I can add
SQL 2008's MERGE statement (Tuesday, April 22, 2008) - One of the coolest new features of SQL Server 2008 (and there are many) is the MERGE statement. This construct has existed in oracle and DB2 for a while now but it's new to SQL Server. Effectively it allows you to merge two tables together, combining UPDATE, INSERTS and DELETEs into one nifty package. For the purposes of demonstration I'm going to provide a simple
CTE Concatenation (Monday, January 01, 2007) - In the past concatenating string values across rows in T-SQL is the kind of thing that typically involved recursive UDFs, temp tables, or some such. Another option was introduced with CTEs back in SQL 2005 which can be recursive. For an example I'm essentially going to combine a table of words into sentences. Consider this structure: declare @words table ( ID
SQL 2008 and powershell (Sunday, January 25, 2009) - with the 2008 releases from microsoft powershell is really making its way into the mainstream. sql server 2008 ships with standard powershell as well as an add-in that provides an interesting degree of integration that will allow DBAs to write scripts that are far more generalized than T-SQL scripts. getting ready to play with it is pretty strait forward. all you
Object Oriented Databases with db4o (Sunday, June 07, 2009) - One of the most notable initiatives in the business software development industry in the last few years is the simplification of data access. The core complication lies in the impedance mismatch between relational storage and object oriented code higher in the stack. Far too much plumbing is required to map object properties to columns in result sets, deal with data
Quick Notes on ScriptTransformers in Solr DataImportHandlers (Saturday, March 20, 2010) - One thing that's impressed me with Solr is the flexibility of the Data Import Handlers (DIHs). When I was new to Solr there were several times I thought for sure I'd have to write my own extension of DataImportHandler. Every time that's happened I've been wrong. A transformer or something handled my needs. Sometimes it's wonderful to be wrong! Especially when
Using Entity Framework with Oracle (Tuesday, December 22, 2009) - I've long thought that the Entity Framework hasn't gotten a fair shake. Sure, there's some room for improvement but for an out-of-the-box ORM that ships with the framework it's not too bad. One thing has always troubled me, though. I was never sure what kind of traction it had with data sources other than SQL Server. Recently in a project circumstances conspired
SQL 2008 FILESTREAM (Saturday, August 04, 2007) - this post was written during the early release candidates and the actual implementation has changed slightly. your mileage may vary with this post. over the years people have attempted to put large amounts of non relational data in SQL. images strike me as the most popular case. generally people either stored the data directly in SQL or stored it on the filesystem
SQL 2008's table valued parameters (Sunday, May 11, 2008) - One of my favorite new features available in SQL 2008 is table valued parameters. For years SQL developers have been dying for this abilty and have been throwing some miserable duct tape at the problem. Before sql 2005 it was common to see strings being passed into stored procedures and then parsed into temporary tables. This approach suffered several major disadvantages
Employing Solr/Lucene with SQL Server for Full-Text Searching (Saturday, December 05, 2009) - I've been fiddling with Lucene a good bit of late and have been quite impressed. It's more than just a "blazing fast" full-text indexing system, especially when implemented via Solr. With Solr it becomes an incredibly scalable, full-featured and extensible search engine platform. I had always assumed that the Lucene stack wasn't for me. For the most part I
Solrnet, a Solr Client Library for .Net (Monday, March 08, 2010) - One of the strength's of Solr is it's ease of consumption by other platforms due to its REST API and response writers which include XML, JSON, native Ruby and native Python code. If you're trying to consume a Solr service from .Net you could easily use a WebClient and parse the results with .Net's System.Xml namespace and perhaps even build an object wrapper on
