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Technical Article

Healthcare Data Models Matter

Healthcare applications come and go, but data live on forever. We’ve seen that since the beginning of the computer industry; when we move from legacy systems into more “modern” architectures, we often leave behind applications, but we almost always take along the data into the future. Even though data are so important, we in health-IT don’t seem to spend the quality time necessary to structure our schemas and databases in such a way as to make it easier to maintain in the future. We often don’t design our data models solidly, and we don’t test them well by putting them through simulations or design them for multiple versions.

2006-03-27

2,502 reads

Technical Article

Ten of the Biggest Mistakes Developers Make With Databases

You may be wonderfully up-to-date with an AJAX Web interface or the latest whizbang Windows user interface, but under the covers, you're probably still pumping data in and out of a database, just as we all did a decade or more ago. That makes it all the more surprising that developers are still making the same database mistakes that date back to those good old days of Windows 95 and before.

2006-03-23

6,331 reads

External Article

Cycling the ERRORLOG file and Deleting Backup History Information

Every DBA needs a few tricks up his/her sleeves to help them better manage their SQL Server 2000 environment. In this article I will explore a couple of such tricks. I will first explore how to cycle the SQL Server error log, and why you might want to do this. Secondly I will discuss backup history information and why you would need to periodically remove some of the older history information.

2006-03-16

2,855 reads

External Article

Practical SQL Server 2005 CLR Assemblies

One advantage of CLR assemblies is the ability to consume web services from within the database. This wouldn’t be easy with T-SQL, and would also require a lot of work in an unmanaged extended stored procedure. With .NET, it’s almost as simple as accessing a local DLL. There are just a couple of extra command-line utilities we need to run to be able to access web services from within a SQL assembly:

2006-03-14

3,849 reads

External Article

Try/Catch Block in SQL Server 2005

Server 2005 now supports a more programmable error trapping convention in T-SQL code. This error handling is known as the TRY/CATCH block. The TRY/CATCH block allows T-SQL to handling errors like other programming languages, such as Microsoft Visual C# and C++. In addition to the TRY/CATCH block, Microsoft has expanded the set of available system functions in SQL Server 2005 for returning error codes and messages when an error occurs in your T-SQL code. This article will explore the new TRY/CATCH block and explain the new system functions for returning error codes and messages.

2006-03-13

3,150 reads

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Where Your Value Separates You from Others

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Fixing the Error

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T-SQL in SQL Server 2025: Encoding Functions

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Question of the Day

Fixing the Error

On SQL Server 2025, I have a database that has this collation: SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS. I decide I want to run this code: 

SELECT UNISTR('*3041*308A*304C*3068 and good night', '*') AS 'A Classic';
I get this error:Msg 9844, Level 16, State 4, Line 24 The char/varchar input type uses an unsupported collation. Only a UTF8 collation is supported with char/varchar input type in UNISTR function.What is the easiest way to fix this error?

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