.NET From India

Learning SQL 2008

If you want to learn what is new in SQL 2008, MS learning has a couple of free trainings that could help you.

What's New in Microsoft SQL Server 2008

Note: You need an understanding of either SQL 2000/2005 for this to be useful

Certification Tips

Came across a set of tips on taking Microsoft certifications at SQL Server Central.

Though it is aimed at the SQL Server exams, most of the tips are really common to any of the certifications. Just replace SQL Server with <your product of choice> :)

Link to Article: Certification Rumors and Tips

Different Int types in SQL Server

I was just catching up with mails and newsletters that had filled my inbox during my recent travel.

This article on the different Int types in SQL Sever caught my eye.

The most surprising part of the whole article is on that there is near enough no performance difference between these type, if you ignore the network. With storage being so cheap now, it usually is of negligible importance to save on storage space, but the no performance impact part was unexpected.

Next Business Day

One of the things you will have to do for almost every enterprise application is to find the next business day. So you have to skip over weekends and holiday. The complexity comes when you start looking at the regional aspects of weekends and holidays.

Rob Scholl has put up an article at SQLServer Central that looks at a recursive function to arrive at this information.

Think before Creating that Lookup Table...

An interesting article at SQLServerCentral on the so called all-in-one Lookup tables.

I agree 100% with the author. I have seen the kind of confusion that one of these table can create. Once people know that there is this thing, every type of code will start getting into it as people like to reuse exisiting facilities, instead of re-inventing the wheel (by creating a new table).

But in real life, I find almost every project lands up with atleast one of these tables.

ODBC Manager error during SQL 2005 setup

I am upgrading my laptop to VS Beta 2 over the weekend. So after a full clean up I started installing the April CTP of SQL Server 2005. And almost at the fag end of the database server install, I get this strange ODBC error: "[Microsoft][ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified".

Two install trys later a bit of googling landed me at Feb CTP fails during setup with "setup could not connect to the database for server configuration".

Well that solved it. But the strange thing is that the blog issue is fixed for the next release, but the April CTP still seems to have that problem!!

Sorting your SQL

Came across this wonderful article that documents a common gotcha when using computations and sorting in a query.

How to use Nulls..

Came upon this interesting article called the Four rules for Nulls. Some of the places where the books online is not exactly correct is pointed out in this article. The most helpful aspect of this article is that it puts together in a single place the best practices to be used in working with NULLs.

Rule #1: Use NULLs to indicate unknown/missing information only. Do not use NULLs in place of zeroes, zero-length strings or other "known" blank values. Update your NULLs with proper information as soon as possible. Rule #2: In ANSI SQL, NULL is not equal to anything, even other NULLs! Comparisons with NULL always result in UNKNOWN.
Rule #3: Use SET ANSI_NULLS ON, and always use ANSI Standard SQL Syntax for NULLs. Straying from the standard can cause problems including portability issues, incompatibility with existing code and databases and returning incorrect results.
Rule #4: The ANSI Standard COALESCE() and CASE syntaxes are preferred over ISNULL() or other proprietary syntax.