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Database matters.

August 2006

Jon Galloway blogs about the use of SET NOCOUNT ON here.

While I appreciate the reduction in network traffic using SET NOCOUNT ON, the main reason I use SET NOCOUNT ON is that in some cases, and I cannot explicitly enumerate which cases, lack of SET NOCOUNT ON causes the stored procedure as called from ADO.NET.

So, the rule should be: SET NOCOUNT ON Always!

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 09:08 PM  Permalink |

Quest has released a new SQL Compare tool, in this case, one that combines schema and data comparison inside a single program. Here is a download page.

Personally, my first attempt to get this working failed with a very odd exception related to a "high surrogate char" without a related low surragate char, but you might have better luck.

It is interesting that this is being released now, as I wonder about even very established vendors in this market, seeing how much of what these tools do is being rolled into the Datebase Developers edition of Visual Studio.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 12:54 PM  Permalink |

Here is a post by Scott Guthrie.

This post by Scott points to a number of other LINQ posts and details of his recent talk on using LINQ with ASP.NET. Among other links is this one to another of Scott's posts covering use of LINQ in ASP.NET.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 12:24 PM  Permalink |

Want to learn about Oracle? Oracle 10g Express is available here.

Free to develop, deploy and distribute.

It really is amazing to see what you can actually get for free these days. As with the MS SQL Server free products, I expect the hope is that developer familiarity will fuel use of the "real" for fee products in the enterprise.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 10:25 AM  Permalink |

Microsoft has released the August Community Technical Preview (CTP) of ADO.NET, available here.

Details of what is in this release are here. I noticed this on the Larkware Daily Grind.

Probably the coolest thing in the new version is the LINQ to DataSet functionality.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 10:33 AM  Permalink |

Fixing Access Annoyances: How to Fix the Most Annoying Things about Your Favorite Database
by Phil Mitchell and Evan Callahan

OK, I admit it. I still support a number of applications written using MS Access. Some I origianlly wrote, and some were written by others. I certainly prefer "Real" databases, but at the end of the day, what counts is what folks will pay for.

If you still do work with Access, Fixing Access Annoyances is a worthwhile investment, both in time and money.

As with many technical books these days, you could read this book cover to cover (as I did), or you could use the book as a reference when confronted with annoyances as you work with Access applications.

Many of the fixes in this book were not news to me, but then again, I have been programming Access since at least the version 1 beta, and was once a part of a group known as Access Insiders. Even so, there were a number of things I learned.

The book is broken up into chapters that cover areas like "Forms", "Queries", "Reports", etc. In many cases, the annoyances are really what most folks (except the Access team, apparently) would consider bugs. In many cases, these annoyances have existed for multiple versions of Access, and will unlikely be completely fixed in future versions.

Many fixes do not require code, but rather require configuration changes in Access. Where appropriate, the authors do drop to VBA code to fix annoyances. In many cases, either free or modest cost utilities are also mentioned as possible fixes. In one or two cases, the authors point you to another book (for instance, the Access Developers Handbook) when the code to fix the annoyance is very long.

So, if you are a longtime Access programmer, or a developer from another world suddenly thrown into Access support, this is the book for you.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 10:08 AM  Permalink |

I posted an entry about a strange bug in SQL Server Management Studio, pointed out by Plip, but something that I believe I have seen and groused about.

Plip's post has garnered a fair number of angry posts about the fact that the bug (related to the size of an nvarchar column getting reset by the tool while entering a new column) was not worth posting. How big a bug is worth posting?

Of course, this one is trivial to work around, if you are paying attention, and if you are not I expect you will discover the size change pretty quickly.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 11:04 AM  Permalink |

Here is a post to the first of a two part series on scripting backup and restore of all databases on a server.

Part two is here.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 02:34 PM  Permalink |

One of the things that can help you ensure that you are doing things correctly is to have a tool that will analyze what you are doing. Of course, you should be able to ensure things are being done correctly by looking at things, but sadly, that does not always work.

Here is a post to a blog entry that discusses a new SQL Server Best Practices Analyser, in the works now. Also, when looking at the original blog entry on the BPA, make sure to take a look at the comments.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 02:33 PM  Permalink |

Here is a post that talks about the details of transferring tables from one SQL Server to another.

The moving of tables from one SQL Server to another has been a constant issue for me. I sometimes need to move the changes to a database where I do not have the ability to directly connect. In that case, I end up using a third party tool such as SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare from Red Gate that allows me to generate scripts that I can then pass off to the administrator of the database I need to update.

In order to do this, I often need to get a backup from the database I need to move changes to, and then restore that database locally so that I can create the script that will make both databases the same, both in structure and in some cases, in data.

Posted by Douglas Reilly at 02:22 PM  Permalink |