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  • How Do You Get Answers?

    - by Grant Fritchey
    We all learn differently. Some people really prefer to sit with a book. Others need class room time, with an instructor. Still others just want to do things themselves until they figure them out. And sometimes, it's all of the above. Since we all learn differently, is it any surprise that we ask questions differently? Some of us are going to want to phrase a very focused question that should yield a limited and concise answer. Others are going to want to have a long involved discussion with possible variations. There are those among us who will want to know whether or not their peers agree with a given answer. Still more are going to want to see lots of points of view dished out so they can understand things in a different way. Many of us want to know when a question has been asked that there is a hard, well defined answer. The rest are willing to read through a bevy of answers and discussion, deciding for ourselves who has come up with the best solution. Where am I going with this? Excellent question. Since we all ask questions in different ways isn't it great that we have places to go that let us ask questions and get answers in a way that's best suited to our individual preferences. Do you want the long-running discussion format? Then you should be hanging out on the forums over at SQL Server Central. Do you want specific answers with direct peer evaluation of the strength of those answers? Then you should be hanging out on the forums over at Ask SQL Server Central. You can get answers to your questions, and do it in a way that's most comfortable for you.

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  • Make the Web Fast: Automagic site optimization with mod_pagespeed 1.0!

    Make the Web Fast: Automagic site optimization with mod_pagespeed 1.0! Ask and vote for questions at: bit.ly mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache module that automatically optimizes web pages and resources on them: images, CSS, JavaScript, and much more. In this episode, we'll catch up with Joshua Marantz, the tech lead of the project at Google and talk about the history of mod_pagespeed, its fast growing adoption (130K+ sites!), technical architecture and how it works under the hood. Finally, we'll talk about the upcoming 1.0 release milestone for the project. If you're curious about mod_pagespeed, then this is definitely the show you won't want to miss! From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 0 0 ratings Time: 00:00 More in Science & Technology

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  • You can step over await

    - by Alex Davies
    I’ve just found the coolest feature of VS 2012 by far. I thought that being able to silence an exception from the “exception was thrown” popup was awesome, and the “reload all” button when a project file changes is amazing, but this is way beyond all of that. You can step over awaits when you debug your code!! With F10!!! Ok, so that may not sound such a big deal. You can step over ifs and whiles and no-one is celebrating. But await is different. await actually stops your method, signs up to be notified when a Task is finished,  returns, and resumes your method at some indeterminate point in the future. You could even end up continuing on a completely different thread. All that happens, and all I have to do is press F10. I used to have to painstakingly set a breakpoint on the first line of my callback before stepping over any asynchronous method. Even when we started using async, my mouse would instinctively click the margin every time I wanted to go past an await. And the times I was driven insane by my breakpoint getting hit by some other path of execution I don’t care about. I think this might have been introduced in the VS11 Beta, I’m pretty sure I tried it in the Async CTP in VS2010 and it didn’t work. Now it does! Woop!

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  • IsNumeric() Broken? Only up to a point.

    - by Phil Factor
    In SQL Server, probably the best-known 'broken' function is poor ISNUMERIC() . The documentation says 'ISNUMERIC returns 1 when the input expression evaluates to a valid numeric data type; otherwise it returns 0. ISNUMERIC returns 1 for some characters that are not numbers, such as plus (+), minus (-), and valid currency symbols such as the dollar sign ($).'Although it will take numeric data types (No, I don't understand why either), its main use is supposed to be to test strings to make sure that you can convert them to whatever numeric datatype you are using (int, numeric, bigint, money, smallint, smallmoney, tinyint, float, decimal, or real). It wouldn't actually be of much use anyway, since each datatype has different rules. You actually need a RegEx to do a reasonably safe check. The other snag is that the IsNumeric() function  is a bit broken. SELECT ISNUMERIC(',')This cheerfully returns 1, since it believes that a comma is a currency symbol (not a thousands-separator) and you meant to say 0, in this strange currency.  However, SELECT ISNUMERIC(N'£')isn't recognized as currency.  '+' and  '-' is seen to be numeric, which is stretching it a bit. You'll see that what it allows isn't really broken except that it doesn't recognize Unicode currency symbols: It just tells you that one numeric type is likely to accept the string if you do an explicit conversion to it using the string. Both these work fine, so poor IsNumeric has to follow suit. SELECT  CAST('0E0' AS FLOAT)SELECT  CAST (',' AS MONEY) but it is harder to predict which data type will accept a '+' sign. SELECT  CAST ('+' AS money) --0.00SELECT  CAST ('+' AS INT)   --0SELECT  CAST ('+' AS numeric)/* Msg 8115, Level 16, State 6, Line 4 Arithmetic overflow error converting varchar to data type numeric.*/SELECT  CAST ('+' AS FLOAT)/*Msg 8114, Level 16, State 5, Line 5Error converting data type varchar to float.*/> So we can begin to say that the maybe IsNumeric isn't really broken, but is answering a silly question 'Is there some numeric datatype to which i can convert this string? Almost, but not quite. The bug is that it doesn't understand Unicode currency characters such as the euro or franc which are actually valid when used in the CAST function. (perhaps they're delaying fixing the euro bug just in case it isn't necessary).SELECT ISNUMERIC (N'?23.67') --0SELECT  CAST (N'?23.67' AS money) --23.67SELECT ISNUMERIC (N'£100.20') --1SELECT  CAST (N'£100.20' AS money) --100.20 Also the CAST function itself is quirky in that it cannot convert perfectly reasonable string-representations of integers into integersSELECT ISNUMERIC('200,000')       --1SELECT  CAST ('200,000' AS INT)   --0/*Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 2Conversion failed when converting the varchar value '200,000' to data type int.*/  A more sensible question is 'Is this an integer or decimal number'. This cuts out a lot of the apparent quirkiness. We do this by the '+E0' trick. If we want to include floats in the check, we'll need to make it a bit more complicated. Here is a small test-rig. SELECT  PossibleNumber,         ISNUMERIC(CAST(PossibleNumber AS NVARCHAR(20)) + 'E+00') AS Hack,        ISNUMERIC (PossibleNumber + CASE WHEN PossibleNumber LIKE '%E%'                                          THEN '' ELSE 'E+00' END) AS Hackier,        ISNUMERIC(PossibleNumber) AS RawIsNumericFROM    (SELECT CAST(',' AS NVARCHAR(10)) AS PossibleNumber          UNION SELECT '£' UNION SELECT '.'         UNION SELECT '56' UNION SELECT '456.67890'         UNION SELECT '0E0' UNION SELECT '-'         UNION SELECT '-' UNION SELECT '.'         UNION  SELECT N'?' UNION SELECT N'¢'        UNION  SELECT N'?' UNION SELECT N'?34.56'         UNION SELECT '-345' UNION SELECT '3.332228E+09') AS examples Which gives the result ... PossibleNumber Hack Hackier RawIsNumeric-------------- ----------- ----------- ------------? 0 0 0- 0 0 1, 0 0 1. 0 0 1¢ 0 0 1£ 0 0 1? 0 0 0?34.56 0 0 00E0 0 1 13.332228E+09 0 1 1-345 1 1 1456.67890 1 1 156 1 1 1 I suspect that this is as far as you'll get before you abandon IsNumeric in favour of a regex. You can only get part of the way with the LIKE wildcards, because you cannot specify quantifiers. You'll need full-blown Regex strings like these ..[-+]?\b[0-9]+(\.[0-9]+)?\b #INT or REAL[-+]?\b[0-9]{1,3}\b #TINYINT[-+]?\b[0-9]{1,5}\b #SMALLINT.. but you'll get even these to fail to catch numbers out of range.So is IsNumeric() an out and out rogue function? Not really, I'd say, but then it would need a damned good lawyer.

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  • Reliable Storage Systems for SQL Server

    By validating the IO path before commissioning the production database system, and performing ongoing validation through page checksums and DBCC checks, you can hopefully avoid data corruption altogether, or at least nip it in the bud. If corruption occurs, then you have to take the right decisions fast to deal with it. Rod Colledge explains how a pessimistic mindset can be an advantage

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  • SSIS Basics: Using the Merge Join Transformation

    SSIS is able to take sorted data from more than one OLE DB data source and merge them into one table which can then be sent to an OLE DB destination. This 'Merge Join' transformation works in a similar way to a SQL join by specifying a 'join key' relationship. this transformation can save a great deal of processing on the destination. Annette Allen, as usual, gives clear guidance on how to do it.

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  • Caching: the Good, the Bad and the Hype

    One of the more important aspects of the scalability of an ASP.NET site is caching. To do this effectively, one must understand the relative permanence and importance of the data that is presented to the user, and work out which of the four major aspects of caching should be used. There is always a compromise, but in most cases it is an easy compromise to make considering its effects in a heavily-loaded production system

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  • .NET Developer Basics – Recursive Algorithms

    Recursion can be a powerful programming technique when used wisely. Some data structures such as tree structures lend themselves far more easily to manipulation by recursive techniques. As it is also a classic Computer Science problem, it is often used in technical interviews to probe a candidate's grounding in basic programming techniques. Whatever the reason, it is well worth brushing up one's understanding with Damon's introduction to Recursion.

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  • Designing Efficient SQL: A Visual Approach

    Sometimes, it is a great idea to push away the keyboard when tackling the problems of an ill-performing, complex, query, and take up pencil and paper instead. By drawing a diagram to show of all the tables involved, the joins, the volume of data involved, and the indexes, you'll see more easily the relative efficiency of the possible paths that your query could take through the tables.

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  • On Handling Dates in SQL

    The calendar is inherently complex by the very nature of the astronomy that underlies the year, and the conflicting historical conventions. The handling of dates in TSQL is even more complex because, when SQL Server was Sybase, it was forced by the lack of prevailing standards in SQL to create its own ways of processing and formatting dates and times. Joe Celko looks forward to a future when it is possible to write standard SQL date-processing code with SQL Server.

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  • Make the Web Fast: Automagic site optimization with mod_pagespeed 1.0!

    Make the Web Fast: Automagic site optimization with mod_pagespeed 1.0! mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache module that automatically optimizes web pages and resources on them: images, CSS, JavaScript, and much more. In this episode, we'll catch up with Joshua Marantz, the tech lead of the project at Google and talk about the history of mod_pagespeed, its fast growing adoption (130K+ sites!), technical architecture and how it works under the hood. Finally, we'll talk about the upcoming 1.0 release milestone for the project. If you're curious about mod_pagespeed, then this is definitely the show you won't want to miss! From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 2 0 ratings Time: 01:05:06 More in Science & Technology

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  • Auditing DDL Changes in SQL Server databases

    Even where Source Control isn't being used by developers, it is still possible to automate the process of tracking the changes being made to a database and put those into Source Control, in order to track what changed and when. You can even get an email alert when it happens. With suitable scripting, you can even do it if you don't have direct access to the live database. Grant shows how easy this is with SQL Compare.

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  • Offsite Backup

    - by Grant Fritchey
    There was a recent weather event in the United States that seriously impacted our power grid and our physical well being. Lots of businesses found that they couldn’t get to their building or that their building was gone. Many of them got to do a full test of their disaster recovery processes. A big part of DR is having the ability to get yourself back online in a different location. Now, most of us are not going to be paying for multiple sites, but, we need the ability to move to one if needed. The best thing you can to start to set this up is have an off-site backup. Want an easy way to automate that? I mean, yeah, you can go to tape or to a portable drive (much more likely these days) and then carry that home, but we’ve all got access to offsite storage these days, SkyDrive, DropBox, S3, etc. How about just backing up to there? I agree. Great idea. That’s why Red Gate is setting up some methods around it. Want to take part in the early access program? Go here and try it out.

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  • Designing Databases for Rapid Resilience

    As the volume of data increases, DBAs need to plan more actively for rapid restores in the event of failure. For this, the intelligent use of filegroups is important, particularly when the Enterprise Edition of SQL Server offers the hope of online restores. How, though, should you arrange your data on the different filegroups? What happenens if the primary filegroup gets corrupted? Why backup and restore indexes?

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  • My book is released – Async in C# 5

    - by Alex Davies
    I’m pleased to announce that my book “Async in C# 5″ has been published by O’Reilly! http://oreil.ly/QQBjO3 If you want to know about how to use async, and whether it’s important for your code, I thoroughly recommend reading it. It’s the best book about the subject I’ve ever written. In fact it’s probably the best book I’ve written full stop. I may have only written one book. It also has a very fetching parrot on the cover, which would make a very good addition to your bookshelf.

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  • Optionally Running SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges with Delgates

    - by Damon Armstrong
    I was writing some SharePoint code today where I needed to give people the option of running some code with elevated permission.  When you run code in an elevated fashion it normally looks like this: SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(()=> {     //Code to run }); It wasn’t a lot of code so I was initially inclined to do something horrible like this: public void SomeMethod(bool runElevated) {     if(runElevated)     {         SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(()=>         {             //Code to run         });     }     else     {         //Copy of code to run     } } Easy enough, but I did not want to draw the ire of my coworkers for employing the CTRL+C CTRL+V design pattern.  Extracting the code into a whole new method would have been overkill because it was a pretty brief piece of code.  But then I thought, hey, wait, I’m basically just running a delegate, so why not define the delegate once and run it either in an elevated context or stand alone, which resulted in this version which I think is much cleaner because the code is only defined once and it didn’t require a bunch of extra lines of code to define a method: public void SomeMethod(bool runElevated) {     var code = new SPSecurity.CodeToRunElevated(()=>     {         //Code to run     });     if(runElevated)     {         SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPermissions(code);         }     else     {         Code();     } }

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  • Collecting the Information in the Default Trace

    The default trace is still the best way of getting important information to provide a security audit of SQL Server, since it records such information as logins, changes to users and roles, changes in object permissions, error events and changes to both database settings and schemas. The only trouble is that the information is volatile. Feodor shows how to squirrel the information away to provide reports, check for unauthorised changes and provide forensic evidence.

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  • Concurrent Affairs

    - by Tony Davis
    I once wrote an editorial, multi-core mania, on the conundrum of ever-increasing numbers of processor cores, but without the concurrent programming techniques to get anywhere near exploiting their performance potential. I came to the.controversial.conclusion that, while the problem loomed for all procedural languages, it was not a big issue for the vast majority of programmers. Two years later, I still think most programmers don't concern themselves overly with this issue, but I do think that's a bigger problem than I originally implied. Firstly, is the performance boost from writing code that can fully exploit all available cores worth the cost of the additional programming complexity? Right now, with quad-core processors that, at best, can make our programs four times faster, the answer is still no for many applications. But what happens in a few years, as the number of cores grows to 100 or even 1000? At this point, it becomes very hard to ignore the potential gains from exploiting concurrency. Possibly, I was optimistic to assume that, by the time we have 100-core processors, and most applications really needed to exploit them, some technology would be around to allow us to do so with relative ease. The ideal solution would be one that allows programmers to forget about the problem, in much the same way that garbage collection removed the need to worry too much about memory allocation. From all I can find on the topic, though, there is only a remote likelihood that we'll ever have a compiler that takes a program written in a single-threaded style and "auto-magically" converts it into an efficient, correct, multi-threaded program. At the same time, it seems clear that what is currently the most common solution, multi-threaded programming with shared memory, is unsustainable. As soon as a piece of state can be changed by a different thread of execution, the potential number of execution paths through your program grows exponentially with the number of threads. If you have two threads, each executing n instructions, then there are 2^n possible "interleavings" of those instructions. Of course, many of those interleavings will have identical behavior, but several won't. Not only does this make understanding how a program works an order of magnitude harder, but it will also result in irreproducible, non-deterministic, bugs. And of course, the problem will be many times worse when you have a hundred or a thousand threads. So what is the answer? All of the possible alternatives require a change in the way we write programs and, currently, seem to be plagued by performance issues. Software transactional memory (STM) applies the ideas of database transactions, and optimistic concurrency control, to memory. However, working out how to break down your program into sufficiently small transactions, so as to avoid contention issues, isn't easy. Another approach is concurrency with actors, where instead of having threads share memory, each thread runs in complete isolation, and communicates with others by passing messages. It simplifies concurrent programs but still has performance issues, if the threads need to operate on the same large piece of data. There are doubtless other possible solutions that I haven't mentioned, and I would love to know to what extent you, as a developer, are considering the problem of multi-core concurrency, what solution you currently favor, and why. Cheers, Tony.

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  • Window Functions in SQL Server

    When SQL Server introduced Window Functions in SQL Server 2005, it was done in a rather tentative way, with only a handful of functions being introduced. This was frustrating, as they remove the last excuse for cursor-based operations by providing aggregations over a partition of the result set, and imposing an ordered sequence over a partition. Now, with SQL Server 2012, we are soon to enjoy a full range of Window Functions. They are going to make for some much simpler SQL queries.

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  • I will be at NNUG Kristiansand tonight

    - by Sahil Malik
    SharePoint 2010 Training: more information Greetings! I will be speaking at NNUG Kristiansand tonight (sorry for the very short notice). So I was thinking what should I demo tonight?Hmm!!!Instead of using any slides or such material, what I thought would be a tonne of fun, would be to develop a service bus based application running in Azure. This will be a good opportunity to code and talk, and run into some snafus and show off some VS2012 improvements/annoyances. At the end of an apprx. 1 hour talk, I hope to have an application ready that you can run yourself by the end of the evening. hehe :) .. now that’s cool isn’t it? :) .. Time permitting I will even tie SP2013 + ADFSv2 + Claims into it, just to be cool. Hope to see you there! Here is the registration link - http://www.nnug.no/Avdelinger/Kristiansand/Moter2/NNUG-Kristiansand---Oktober/ Read full article ....

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  • Windows Azure from a Data Perspective

    Before creating a data application in Windows Azure, it is important to make choices based on the type of data you have, as well as the security and the business requirements. There are a wide range of options, because Windows Azure has intrinsic data storage, completely separate from SQL Azure, that is highly available and replicated. Your data requirements are likely to dictate the type of data storage options you choose.

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  • How to stop Office 2010 changing " and ' to smart quotes

    - by fatherjack
    I have recently upgraded to Office 2010 at work and there are a few things that are a real problem for me. As a T-SQL developer and SQL Server DBA I copy and paste code to and from various applications and if Word gets involved it can has disastrous consequences. There is an option that appears to be defaulted to "on" that changes a straight quote to what Word describes as a smart quote - see the image below. Note - the single quote suffers from the same effect. Now, getting to the point that...(read more)

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  • Event-Driven Debugging

    - by Brian Donahue
    Most application troubleshooting involves getting an error, analyzing the error message, and at worst, attaching a debugger to work out the real cause. What is not really covered is how to troubleshoot an applicaiton that is not errant, but is having a performance issue, and more than likely, in the middle of the night when you are snug in your bed, sawing logs. What you need is an ever-vigilant cyborg who never sleeps to sit in front of your server all night, but as SkyNet is not live yet, you can settle for the next-best thing. Windows provides performance counters and alerts that can tell you when an applicaiton reaches an unacceptable threshold of naughty behavior, but although it can tattle on your brainchild, it won't be the child psychiatrist that you need to tell you why he's pulling your server's pigtails and pulling faces at the teacher. What you need is to plug a debugger into performance monitor and have it tell you what's going on with your applicaiton at the time. For this purpose, I'd used Microsoft's MDbgEngine as the basis for an applicaiton that will dump a program's stacks, I call it Application Slicer Dicer Wonder Dumper Super Cyborg, or StackOMatic for short. StackOMatic can look at a program's behavior and tell you if the stacks are not moving, but it can also work on the command-line to dump all managed methods on the stack at will. Now that there is a command you can use to dump the stacks, all you need to do is politely tell Windows to run it when you're displeased with your creation as it's trashing the CPU of your server at 3 AM. The first step is to create a scheduled task to tell StackOMatic to dump your applicaiton. Start Task Scheduler and right-click Task Scheduler Library and then Create Task. For this exercise I'm creating a task that will dump the Red Gate SQL Monitor Base Monitor Service. In the Actions tab, I enter the path to StackOMatic and use the arguments to log the stack dump to a file: /PN:RedGate.Response.Engine.Alerting.Base.Service /OUT:c:\users\administrator\MonitorLog.txt Next, I go into Windows Server 2008's Reliability and Performance Monitor and add a new Data Collector Set. This set will produce an alert on the %Processor Time for the service. When the processor time breaches 50%, it will run the StackDumpBaseService task I created. Whenever the service misbehaves, it will append to the log file. Now when I go to work in the morning, I can see what the service was doing when it overloaded the processor and take action.

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