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• SQL SERVER – Preserve Leading Zero While Coping to Excel from SSMS

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier I wrote two articles about how to efficiently copy data from SSMS to Excel. Since I wrote that post there are plenty of interest generated on this subject. There are a few questions I keep on getting over this subject. One of the question is how to get the leading zero preserved while copying the data from SSMS to Excel. Well it is almost the same way as my earlier post SQL SERVER – Excel Losing Decimal Values When Value Pasted from SSMS ResultSet. The key here is in EXCEL and not in SQL Server. The step here is to change the format of Excel Cell to Text from Numbers and that will preserve the value of the with leading or trailing Zeros in Excel. However, I assume this is done for display purpose only because once you convert column to Text you may find it difficult to do numeric operations over the column for example Aggregation, Average etc. If you need to do the same you should either convert the columns back to Numeric in Excel or do the process in Database and export the same value as along with it as well. However, I have seen in requirement in the real world where the user has to have a numeric value with leading Zero values in it for display purpose. Here is my suggestion, instead of manipulating numeric value in the database and converting it to character value the ideal thing to do is to store it as a numeric value only in the database. Whatever changes you want to do for display purpose should be handled at the time of the display using the format function of SQL or Application Language. Honestly, database is data layer and presentation is presentation layer – they are two different things and if possible they should not be mixed. If due to any reason you cannot follow above advise and you need is to have append leading zeros in the database only here are two of my previous articles I suggest you to refer them. I am open to learn new tricks as these articles are almost three years old. Please share your opinion and suggestions in the comments area. SQL SERVER – Pad Ride Side of Number with 0 – Fixed Width Number Display SQL SERVER – UDF – Pad Ride Side of Number with 0 – Fixed Width Number Display Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Function, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Excel

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• Summit Old, Summit New, Summit Borrowed...

  - by Rob Farley

  PASS Summit is coming up, and I thought I’d post a few things. Summit Old... At the PASS Summit, you will get the chance to hear presentations by the SQL Server establishment. Just about every big name in the SQL Server world is a regular at the PASS Summit, so you will get to hear and meet people like Kalen Delaney (@sqlqueen) (who just recently got awarded MVP status for the 20th year running), and from all around the world such as the UK’s Chris Webb (@technitrain) or Pinal Dave (@pinaldave) from India. Almost all the household names in SQL Server will be there, including a large contingent from Microsoft. The PASS Summit is by far the best place to meet the legends of SQL Server. And they’re not all old. Some are, but most of them are younger than you might think. ...Summit New... The hottest topics are often about the newest technologies (such as SQL Server 2012). But you will almost certainly learn new stuff about older versions too. But that’s not what I wanted to pick on for this point. There are many new speakers at every PASS Summit, and content that has not been covered in other places. This year, for example, LobsterPot’s Roger Noble (@roger_noble) is giving a presentation for the first time. He’s a regular around the Australian circuit, but this is his first time presenting to a US audience. New Zealand’s Paul White (@sql_kiwi) is attending his first PASS Summit, and will be giving over four hours of incredibly deep stuff that has never been presented anywhere in the US before (I can’t say the world, because he did present similar material in Adelaide earlier in the year). ...Summit Borrowed... No, I’m not talking about plagiarism – the talks you’ll hear are all their own work. But you will get a lot of stuff you’ll be able to take back and apply at work. The PASS Summit sessions are not full of sales-pitches, telling you about how great things could be if only you’d buy some third-party vendor product. It’s simply not that kind of conference, and PASS doesn’t allow that kind of talk to take place. Instead, you’ll be taught techniques, and be able to download scripts and slides to let you perform that magic back at work when you get home. You will definitely find plenty of ideas to borrow at the PASS Summit. ...Summit Blue Yeah – and there’s karaoke. Blue - Jason - SQL Karaoke - YouTube

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• SQL SERVER – Quiz and Video – Introduction to Basics of a Query Hint

  - by pinaldave

  This blog post is inspired from SQL Architecture Basics Joes 2 Pros: Core Architecture concepts – SQL Exam Prep Series 70-433 – Volume 3. [Amazon] | [Flipkart] | [Kindle] | [IndiaPlaza] This is follow up blog post of my earlier blog post on the same subject - SQL SERVER – Introduction to Basics of a Query Hint – A Primer. In the article we discussed various basics terminology of the query hints. The article further covers following important concepts of query hints. Expecting Seek and getting a Scan Creating an index for improved optimization Implementing the query hint Above three are the most important concepts related to query hint and SQL Server.  There are many more things one has to learn but without beginners fundamentals one can’t learn the advanced  concepts. Let us have small quiz and check how many of you get the fundamentals right. Quiz 1) You have the following query: DECLARE @UlaChoice TinyInt SET @Type = 1 SELECT * FROM LegalActivity WHERE UlaChoice = @UlaChoice You have a nonclustered index named IX_Legal_Ula on the UlaChoice field. The Primary key is on the ID field and called PK_Legal_ID 99% of the time the value of the @UlaChoice is set to ‘YP101′. What query will achieve the best optimization for this query? SELECT * FROM LegalActivity WHERE UlaChoice = @UlaChoice WITH(INDEX(X_Legal_Ula)) SELECT * FROM LegalActivity WHERE UlaChoice = @UlaChoice WITH(INDEX(PK_Legal_ID)) SELECT * FROM LegalActivity WHERE UlaChoice = @UlaChoice OPTION (Optimize FOR(@UlaChoice = ‘YP101′)) 2) You have the following query: SELECT * FROM CurrentProducts WHERE ShortName = ‘Yoga Trip’ You have a nonclustered index on the ShortName field and the query runs an efficient index seek. You change your query to use a variable for ShortName and now you are using a slow index scan. What query hint can you use to get the same execution time as before? WITH LOCK FAST OPTIMIZE FOR MAXDOP READONLY Now make sure that you write down all the answers on the piece of paper. Watch following video and read earlier article over here. If you want to change the answer you still have chance. Solution 1) 3 2) 4 Now compare let us check the answers and compare your answers to following answers. I am very confident you will get them correct. Available at USA: Amazon India: Flipkart | IndiaPlaza Volume: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Please leave your feedback in the comment area for the quiz and video. Did you know all the answers of the quiz? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Joes 2 Pros, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Are there code reviews in opensource projects? If so, what tools are used to do this?

  - by monksy

  I know there is a big push for code reviews in commercial development. However, are code reviews used in open source software or is based on trust? If so, then how are they performed? [Is it a delayed commit, "a pre commit environment", is there a tool that allows for the patch to be sent to another dev]? Are there any projects that use code reviews? From my understanding the linux kernel is mostly based around trust of the commitor. MySQL was based on the main author's approval and the performance impact.

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• Eye-Infinity across 3 displays with a Radeon 6800

  - by Peter G Mac.

  So I purchased a computer recently and have been trying to customise the display. Radeon HD 6800 series Ubuntu 10.10. I have three 22inch 1080P lcd monitors that are mounted together. Everything is working smooth. How do I get the 'big-desktop' display where I have one enormous display across all monitors? Linux - ATI Catalyst Control Center 11.2 does not give me an option to 'group' my profiles like the pictures on their site show with Windows. I have been searching all over for help. Much Obliged, -Peter

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• General input/output error on OpenOffice 3.2

  - by Scott

  I have been working on a research paper in OpenOffice 3.2 Word Processor and I had a slide show OpenOffice 3.2 Presentation. I saved both frequently and they were not very big (no more then 5 pages of text or a few slides). A few days after I last edited and saved them, I tried to open the slide show but I received window saying: General Error. General input/output error When I tried opening the paper, it asked for ASCII Filter Options (font, character, language, and paragraph break). When I set the normal settings, a single blank document opened with nothing on it. I looked at both of the file's properties and the size was 0 or 1.5 KB, and the volume was unknown. I recently installed some updates for Ubuntu 10.10 and everything else in my computer is working normally including other documents and slide shows. Is this a fixable crash?

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• SQL SERVER – Difference Between CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and GETDATE() – CURRENT_TIMESTAMP Equivalent in SQL Server

  - by pinaldave

  A common question – I often get from Oracle/MySQL Professionals: “What is the Equivalent to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP in SQL Server?” Here is a common question I often get from SQL Server Professionals: “What are differences between Difference Between CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and GETDATE ()?” Very simple question but have showed up so frequently that I feel like to write about it. Well in SQL Server GETDATE() is Equivalent to CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. However, if you use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP in your select statement it will work fine. You can see in the above example – both of them returns the same value. Now let us go to next question regarding difference between GETDATE and CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. Well, the matter of the fact, there is no difference between them in SQL Server (Reference Link). CURRENT_TIMESTAMP is an ANSI SQL function, whereas GETDATE is T-SQL implementation of the same function. Both of them derive value from the operating system of the computer on which SQL Server instance is running. Above discussion prompts another question – in this case, what should one use GETDATE or CURRENT_TIMESTAMP? Well, this is indeed tricky and interesting question. I think I am very comfortable using the GETDATE () so I will go to use it but a matter of the fact there is no right or wrong answer. If you want to follow ancient saying “When in Rome, do as the Romans do”, I suggest using the GETDATE (), or continue using CURRENT_TIMESTAMP. With that said, there is one very important property we all need to keep in mind. If you use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP while creating an object, they are automatically converted to GETDATE() and stored internally. To illustrate what I am suggesting here is the example - Create a table using the following script CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TestTable]( [Cold2] [datetime] NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[TestTable] ADD DEFAULT (CURRENT_TIMESTAMP) FOR [Cold2] GO Now go to SSMS and generate the script for the table and you will notice following syntax. CREATE TABLE [dbo].[TestTable]( [Cold2] [datetime] NULL ) ON [PRIMARY] GO ALTER TABLE [dbo].[TestTable] ADD DEFAULT (GETDATE()) FOR [Cold2] GO You can notice that SQL Server have automatically converted CURRENT_TIMESTAMP to GETDATE(). I guess this gives us an idea how they behave. Now go ahead and make your choice! Do let me know which one will you use CURRENT_TIMESTAMP or GETDATE () in the comments area. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL DateTime, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• How do I let programmers know something useful?

  - by Shane

  Quite often I go through pain to discover how to do something useful, in this case how to get PHP running on Google App Engine without the 'resin.jar too big' problem, but I have nowhere to let people know. In this particular case, the web answers were incomplete, outdated or plain wrong. I could create a blog, but it's overkill. I just want let programmers know a quick solution/approach. I'm not sure it's the done thing to ask a question and then answer it. In short, it'd be nice to be able to just dump a sort of combined question/answer/snippet, then let others comment as usual, shoot it down, like it, whatever. How do the rest of you approach this? Cheers, Shane

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• Oracle Services for Oracle Engineered Systems

  - by Bandari Huang

  ACS(Advanced Customer Support) for Engineered Systems Oracle Solution Support Center Oracle Advanced Monitoring and Resolution ACS for Exadata Oracle Exadata Start-Up Pack Exadata Disk Swap Service Exadata Re-rack Service ACS for Exalogic Oracle Exalogic Start-Up Pack ACS for SuperCluster Oracle SPARC SuperCluster Start-Up Pack ACS for Exalytics Oracle Exalytics Start-Up Pack ACS for BDA(Big Data Appliance) ACS for ODA(Oracle Database Appliance) ACS for ZSA(ZFS Storage Appliance) ACS for ZBA(ZFS Backup Appliance) OCS(Oracle Consulting Services) for Engineered Systems Oracle Expert Services for Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle Consulting Virtualization Services  OCS for Exadata Oracle Exadata Architecture Service Oracle Exadata Architecture Transition Service Oracle Exadata Implementation Service Oracle Expert Services for SAP on Oracle Exadata Oracle Exadata Roadmap Service OCS for Exalogic Oracle Exalogic Architecture Service Oracle Exalogic Implementation Service  

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• Making an interface for input in C - How?

  - by tloszk

  I have a big question. I started to develop a simple 3D engine (or should I call it framework?). I use OpenGL for rendering and it is developed for Windows. It is all written in C. But I don't know, how to write an "interface" for the keyboard/mouse input. I would like to keep it as simple as possible and nice - what the Win32 "native" input system is not. If anyone has suggestions about the topic, please, tell me. Thanks for everyone, who answers to my question!

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• Tiled game: how to correct load background image ?

  - by stighy

  Hi, i'm a newbie. I'm trying to develop a 2d game (top-down view). I would like to load a standard background, a textured ground... My "world" is big, for example 3000px X 3000px. I think it is not a good idea to load a 3000px x 3000px image and move it... So, how is the best practice ? To load a single small image (64x64) and repeat it for N times ? If yes, ok, but how i can manage the "background" movement ? Thanks Bye!

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• Finding Those Pesky Unicode Characters in Visual Studio

  - by fallen888

  Sometimes I’m handed HTML that I need to wire up and I find these characters.  Usually there are only a couple on the page and, while annoying to find, it’s not a big deal.  Recently I found dozens and dozens of these guys on a page and wasn’t very happy at the prospect of having to manually search them all out and remove/replace them.  That is, until I did some research and found this very  helpful article by Aaron Jensen - Finding Non-ASCII Characters with Visual Studio. Aaron’s wonderful solution: Try searching your code with the following regular expression: [^\x00-\x7f] Open any of Visual Studio’s find windows and enter the regular expression above into the “Find what:” text box. Click the “Find Options” plus sign to expand the list of options. Check the last box “Use:” and choose “Regular expressions” from the drop down menu. Easy and efficient.  Thanks, Aaron!

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• Kill a tree, save your website? Content strategy in action, part III

  - by Roger Hart

  A lot has been written about how driving content strategy from within an organisation is hard. And that's true. Red Gate is pretty receptive to new ideas, so although I've not had a total walk in the park, it's been a hike with charming scenery. But I'm one of the lucky ones. Lots of people are involved in content, and depending on your organisation some of those people might be the kind who'll gleefully call themselves "stakeholders". People holding a stake generally want to stick it through something's heart and bury it at a crossroads. Winning them over is not always easy. (Richard Ingram has made a nice visual summary of how this can feel - Content strategy Snakes & ladders - pdf ) So yes, a lot of content strategy advocates are having a hard time. And sure, we've got a nice opportunity to get together and have a hug and a cry, but in the interim we could use a hand. What to do? My preferred approach is, I'll confess, brutal. I'd like nothing so much as to take a scorched earth approach to our website. Burn it, salt the ground, and build the new one right: focusing on clearly delineated business and user content goals, and instrumented so we can tell if we're doing it right. I'm never getting buy-in for that, but a boy can dream. So how about just getting buy-in for some small, tenable improvements? Easier, but still non-trivial. I sat down for a chat with our marketing and design guys. It seemed like a good place to start, even if they weren't up for my "Ctrl-A + Delete"  solution. We talked through some of this stuff, and we pretty much agreed that our content is a bit more broken than we'd ideally like. But to get everybody on board, the problems needed visibility. Doing a visual content inventory Print out the internet. Make a Wall Of Content. Seriously. If you've already done a content inventory, you know your architecture, and you know the scale of the problem. But it's quite likely that very few other people do. So make it big and visual. I'm going to carbon hell, but it seems to be working. This morning, I printed out a tiny, tiny part of our website: the non-support content pertaining to SQL Compare I made big, visual, A3 blowups of each page, and covered a wall with them. A page per web page, spread over something like 6M x 2M, with metrics, right in front of people. Even if nobody reads it (and they are doing) the sheer scale is shocking. 53 pages, all told. Some are redundant, some outdated, some trivial, a few fantastic, and frighteningly many that are great ideas delivered not-quite-right. You have to stand quite far away to get it all in your field of vision. For a lot of today, a whole bunch of folks have been gawping in amazement, talking each other through it, peering at the details, and generally getting excited about content. Developers, sales guys, our CEO, the marketing folks - they're engaged. Will it last? I make no promises. But this sort of wave of interest is vital to getting a content strategy project kicked off. While the content strategist is a saucer-eyed orphan in the cupboard under the stairs, they're not getting a whole lot done. Of course, just printing the site won't necessarily cut it. You have to know your content, and be able to talk about it. Ideally, you'll also have page view and time-on-page metrics. One of the most powerful things you can do is, when people are staring at your wall of content, ask them what they think half of it is for. Pretty soon, you've made a case for content strategy. We're also going to get folks to mark it up - cover it with notes and post-its, let us know how they feel about our content. I'll be blogging about how that goes, but it's exciting. Different business functions have different needs from content, so the more exposure the content gets, and the more feedback, the more you know about those needs. Fingers crossed for awesome.

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• Need help starting with a game in Flash/AS3

  - by Hossein

  Hi, I am kinda new to flash/AS3. I have written some stuff and now I now the basics of AS. I want to develop a game in which my character moves. exactly like the way Super Mario moves(the background changes and new obstacles come in the way like and animation with which you can interact by climbing and shooting etc.) There is one big thing that I don't understand is that how to make my background moving and introduce new obstacles when my character moves forward. Currently my scene is static which means the background is the same and obstacles are also stationary. Can some point me to a tutorial or give me an answer that solves my confusion? thanks

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• How will Quantum computing affect us?

  - by CiscoIPPhone

  I am interested in quantum computing, but have not studied it in depth. Things like Shor's algorithm intrigue me. My question is: If quantum computing took off in a big way (i.e. functional quantum home computers were available) how would it affect us programmers and software developers? Would we have to learn how to make use of superposition and entanglement - would it change how we write algorithms? Would more mathematical programmers be required/would we need new skills? Would it change nothing at all from our perspective (i.e. would it be abstracted)? Your opinion is welcome.

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• adding hard drive failed

  - by dennis ditch

  i was using von welch's instructions at http://v2kblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/adding-second-hard-drive.html] to install a 500 gig seagate drive to write the recordings to. everything seemed to be going ok until mkfs /dev/sdb1 then we get an error message mkfs.ext2: inode_size (128) * inodes_count (0) too big for a filesystem with 0 blocks, specify a higher inode_ratio (-i) or lower inode count (-N) my son is trying to help me but this is beyond him. our knowledge of unix/linux is very limited. at work the support people just sent me a line by line cook book. i would appreciate any help you can give us. the computer is a gateway mdp e4000 . mythbuntu is installed on a pata drive and we are adding a sata drive for the second drive. the bios sees the drive.

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• What can I do with dynamic typing that I can not do with static typing

  - by Justin984

  I've been using python for a few days now and I think I understand the difference between dynamic and static typing. What I don't understand is why it's useful. I keep hearing about its "flexibility" but it seems like it just moves a bunch of compile time checks to runtime, which means more unit tests. This seems like an awfully big tradeoff to make for small advantages like readability and "flexibility". Can someone provide me with a real world example where dynamic typing allows me to do something I can't do with static typing?

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• Is GParted safe?

  - by Olivier Pons

  I want to resize my partitions: I have 3 partitions: Ubuntu 10.04 Windows Seven Ubuntu 11.10 It's booting with the boot installed by the Ubuntu 11.10 version. I want to expand (only expand) all the 3 partitions. My HD is 1,8 Tb so it's big and I have no possibility to save before expanding. So my question is: if you tell me GParted work 99,99 % of the time, I'm willing to take the risk. If you tell me GParted work 90 % of the time, I won't take that risk.

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• Should I reorder partitions regarding performance

  - by Marcel

  I have in principal 3 big partitions on my Netbook. One Windows, one for shared files, one for Ubuntu. I recently find out (using hdparm) the the hardisk seems to have much better perfomance on the first 2/3 (~ 60MB/s) than on the last 1/3 (~ 40MB/s). I am thinking to delete the second partition and create new partitions for "swap" and / directly after Windows. Does this effort make sense? I also wanna upgrade to 10.4/10.10 but keep the option to go back to the old system, so maybe I install ubuntu completely in a/this new partition?

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• Design Code Outside of an IDE (C#)?

  - by ryanzec

  Does anyone design code outside of an IDE? I think that code design is great and all but the only place I find myself actually design code (besides in my head) is in the IDE itself. I generally think about it a little before hand but when I go to type it out, it is always in the IDE; no UML or anything like that. Now I think having UML of your code is really good because you are able to see a lot more of the code on one screen however the issue I have is that once I type it in UML, I then have to type the actual code and that is just a big duplicate for me. For those who work with C# and design code outside of Visual Studio (or at least outside Visual Studio's text editor), what tools do you use? Do those tools allow you to convert your design to actual skeleton code? It is also possible to convert code to the design (when you update the code and need an updated UML diagram or whatnot)?

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• Caching large amount of ajax returned objects

  - by ofcapl

  I'm building an application which fetches large amount of items with ajax requests via other application API. It returns me 6k - 30k js objects which are used multiple times across various application views (sorting, filtering etc.). I would like to avoid querying API every time for such big list so I decided to cache this data somehow. I was thinking about various solutions: saving it to localstorage, using some caching library (e.g. locachejs), storing in js var. I'm not an expert so I would like to hear Your suggestions about each (or one of these) solution, about its pros and cons. Every help will be very appreciated.

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• how to follow python polymorphism standards with math functions

  - by krishnab

  So I am reading up on python in Mark Lutz's wonderful LEARNING PYTHON book. Mark makes a big deal about how part of the python development philosophy is polymorphism and that functions and code should rely on polymorphism and not do much type checking. However, I do a lot of math type programming and so the idea of polymorphism does not really seem to apply--I don't want to try and run a regression on a string or something. So I was wondering if there is something I am missing here. What are the applications of polymorphism when I am writing functions for math--or is type checking philosophically okay in this case.

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• Links from UK TechDays 2010 sessions on Entity Framework, Parallel Programming and Azure

  - by Eric Nelson

  [I will do some longer posts around my sessions when I get back from holiday next week] Big thanks to all those who attended my 3 sessions at TechDays this week (April 13th and 14th, 2010). I really enjoyed both days and watched some great session – my personal fave being the Silverlight/Expression session by my friend and colleague Mike Taulty. The following links should help get you up and running on each of the technologies. Entity Framework 4 Entity Framework 4 Resources http://bit.ly/ef4resources Entity Framework Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet Entity Framework Design Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/efdesign/ Parallel Programming Parallel Computing Developer Center http://msdn.com/concurrency Code samples http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/ParExtSamples Managed Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/pfxteam Tools Team Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/visualizeparallel My code samples http://gist.github.com/364522  And PDC 2009 session recordings to watch: Windows Azure Platform UK Site http://bit.ly/landazure UK Community http://bit.ly/ukazure (http://ukazure.ning.com ) Feedback www.mygreatwindowsazureidea.com Azure Diagnostics Manager - A client for Windows Azure Diagnostics Cloud Storage Studio - A client for Windows Azure Storage SQL Azure Migration Wizard http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com

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• Looking Back at PASS Summit 2013 - Location

  - by RickHeiges

  Now that it has been a few weeks since the Summit, I wanted to look back at the location "experiment". Convention Center - It seemed to work well for the conference. There were quite a few areas in the area where you could sit down and get some work down or have a discussion. For the larger welcome reception the first night, I really liked the different areas. If you wanted to enjoy the Quiz Bowl, the ballroom area was set up nicely with big screens so that everyone could see and hear. The area right...(read more)

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• SQL SERVER – Simple Explanation and Puzzle with SOUNDEX Function and DIFFERENCE Function

  - by pinaldave

  Earlier this week I asked a question where I asked how to Swap Values of the column without using CASE Statement. Read here: A Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement,there were more than 50 solutions proposed in the comment. There were many creative solutions. I have mentioned my personal favorite (different ones) here: Solution of Puzzle – Swap Value of Column Without Case Statement. However, I received lots of questions regarding one of the Solution by SIJIN KUMAR V P. He has used the function SOUNDEX in his solution. The request was to explain how SOUNDEX and DIFFERENCE works. Well, there are pretty decent documentations provided over here SOUNDEX function and DIFFERENCE over on MSDN and if I attempt to explain this function I will end up writing the same details which are available on MSDN. Instead of writing theory, we will try to learn this function by using a couple of simple puzzles. You try to solve the puzzles using the MSDN and see if you can learn something very quickly. In simple words - SOUNDEX converts an alphanumeric string to a four-character code to find similar-sounding words or names. The first character of the code is the first character of character_expression and the second through fourth characters of the code are numbers that represent the letters in the expression. Vowels incharacter_expression are ignored unless they are the first letter of the string. DIFFERENCE function returns an integer value. The  integer returned is the number of characters in the SOUNDEX values that are the same. The return value ranges from 0 through 4: 0 indicates weak or no similarity, and 4 indicates strong similarity or the same values. Learning Puzzle 1: Now let us run following four queries and observe its output. SELECT SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SLTR') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SaLaTaRa') SdxValue SELECT SOUNDEX('SaLaTaRaM') SdxValue When you look at the result set all the four values are same. The reason for all the values to be same is as for SQL Server SOUNDEX function all the four strings are similarly sounding string. Learning Puzzle 2: Now let us run following five queries and observe its output. SELECT DIFFERENCE (SOUNDEX('SLTR'),SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE (SOUNDEX('TH'),SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SQLAuthority',SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SLTR',SOUNDEX('SQLAuthority')) SELECT DIFFERENCE ('SLTR','SQLAuthority') When you look at the result set you will get the result in the ranges from 1 to 4. Here is how it works if your result is 0 which means absolutely not relevant to each other and if your result is 1 which means the results are relevant to each other. Have you ever used above two functions in your business need or on production server? If yes, would you please leave a comment with use cases. I believe it will be beneficial to everyone. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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