Database Geek of the Week - Richard Hundhausen

Richard Hundhausen is the author of Building Web Applications with ADO.NET and XML Web Services and Programming ADO.NET, both from Wiley, as well as the upcoming Working with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System from Microsoft Press. He is also a trainer, teaching numerous courses and speaking at conferences such as VSLive and Tech Ed.

Asynchronous client script callbacks

There has been a lot of interest in the web-facing community lately about a new useability feature that goes by a number of different names—XMLHTTP, AJAX, out-of-band requests, and asynchronous client script callbacks, to name a few.

Regardless of the name, this feature provides a way for a standard web page to make calls back to the server, without a traditional page refresh. The user is oblivious to the fact that a server call has occurred, and is not interrupted by it.

Calculate Weekdays Between 2 Dates (revised)

This is a function that takes a start date and end date as parameters and returns the number of weekdays (Monday to Friday) in between. This function assumes that Sunday is set as the first day of the week. Adapted from a vb function that I wrote to calculate standard salary costs for billing purposes. […]

MDX Essentials: String Functions: The .UniqueName Function

n this lesson, we will examine another function / property in the MDX toolset, the .UniqueName function. The general purpose of the .UniqueName function is to return the Unique Name of the object to which it is appended. .UniqueName can be used in conjunction with hierarchies, dimensions, levels, and members, in a manner similar to the .Name function that we examined in String Functions: The .Name Function, and, also like .Name, .UniqueName can be useful in a host of different applications.

Comprehensive HTML Database Documentation(Revised)

This script will document tables (including constraints and triggers, row counts, sizes on disk), views (including all used fields), stored procedures (including used fields and parameters), database users, database settings and server settings.This script has been cobbled together from several others found on this site, so they deserve the recognition, not me 🙂Simply execute it […]

Controlling Transactions and Locks in SQL 2000 and 2005 - Part 2

In order for a transaction to meet the requirements of ACID, locks are employed to insure data integrity and multi-user access. The scope, or number of rows held by a lock, is referred to as Lock Granularity. This month, we will begin by introducing several different types of lock modes employed by MS SQL.

Regular Expression Transformation

The regular expression transformation exposes the power of regular expression matching within the pipeline. One or more columns can be selected, and for each column an individual expression can be applied. If all columns selected pass their tests then rows are passed down the successful match output. Rows that fail to pass all tests are directed down the alternate output.

Software patents: stupid or insane?

Lest the headline mislead you as to my biases, I consider software patents to be both stupid and insane. I raise this issue because it is currently rearing its ugly mug in the world of open source software, but it has affected much development in the proprietary worlds of Windows as well.

First of all, patent laws were created long ago, which is not to say the thinking was correct then either, but we have to recognize the intellectual and technological climate back then.

Living the "Least Privilege" Lifestyle: Don't Run Every Day Logged In

Don Kiely contends that exercising administrative rights over our computers is a major cause of insecure systems. In the first of five articles, he explains the concept of "least privilege" and shows why software developers should be happy to operate as "mere users."

So you want to be a DBA...

Written by an Oracle guy, but it's still some good advice for people that want to be DBAs. If you're experienced, pass it along to others that are looking to move into this role.