Technical Article

File Watcher Task

The File Watcher Task does what it says really, it watches a folder waiting for files. When an available file is found the task completes, returning the name of the file for later use.

The task will detect changes to existing files as well as new files, both actions will cause the file to be found when available. A file is available when the task can open it exclusively. This is important for files that take a long time to be written, such as large files, or those that are just written slowly or delivered via a slow network link.

External Article

"TOP" Clause in SQL Server 2005

We all know the "TOP" clause returns the first n number of rows or percentage of rows thereby limiting the number of resulting rows displayed when we are selecting rows in a table.

SQL Server 2005 is packed with new features and enhancements. One of the enhancements in SQL 2005 that we are going to see is the clause, "TOP." The "TOP" clause will now allow us to do Data Manipulation and also allow similar criteria results to be displayed by using the TIES option.

External Article

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.

Blogs

Learning from Mistakes: T-SQL Tuesday #194

By

We’re a week late, once again my fault. I was still coming out of...

Stupid Things I Did With AI: ASCII Art

By

I ran across this article recently (https://www.gatesnotes.com/meet-bill/source-code/reader/microsoft-original-source-code) and it has a great opening piece...

Simple Talks Podcasting in 2026

By

I’m in the UK today, having arrived this morning in London. Hopefully, by this...

Read the latest Blogs

Forums

Learning From Breakage

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Learning From Breakage

Python in Action to Auto-Generate an Optimized PostgreSQL Index Strategy

By sabyda

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Python in Action to Auto-Generate...

Adding and Dropping Columns I

By Steve Jones - SSC Editor

Comments posted to this topic are about the item Adding and Dropping Columns I

Visit the forum

Question of the Day

Adding and Dropping Columns I

I have this table in my SQL Server 2022 database:

CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CityList]
(
[CityNameID] [int] NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1),
[CityName] [varchar] (30) COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS NULL
) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
I decide to add two new columns for the StateProvince and Country. What code should I use?

See possible answers