The regular expression engine in .NET is an awesome technology for text processing and string manipulation and is definitely one tool you want to have in your development arsenal. But Regex syntax is one of the more difficult languages to get your mind around because, at first glance, it looks like a meaningless jumble of … Read more
Most bloggers start out with an overly idealistic view that their blog is going to contain Pulitzer quality coverage of current events and issues and that millions of people will flock to their site daily to hear the latest buzz. That optimism quickly degrades when you realize that you’re blogging about once every four months … Read more
In the press room, Mary Jo Foley (from Microsoft Watch) was expounding on how hard it was to predict which articles would really take off and which would bomb. She would write controversial pieces on the latest hot topics, such as SharePoint, expecting a whirlwind response and getting barely a breeze. She then punts out … Read more
I met a lot of good people today at Tech Ed yesterday. I know that may seem a rather trite thing to say, but I just can’t come up with a better way to summarize my day. In the morning, I had a nice chat with Bob Beauchemin, whose written work I admire a lot, … Read more
While taking a spot of lunch in Cambridge (Boston), I noticed in my trusty guidebook a place called “The Miracle of Science Bar”. It was not far away and apparently served “good beer in laboratory beakers” in honor of the many MIT students that frequented the place. As an ex-Chemist I was sold immediately, and … Read more
On a doorway in DoverI once stumbled overa programmer wrapped in a sheetThis poor prostrate nerddidn’t utter a word as he lay there half-blocking the street “From your face I can seethat you work in ITwhat has brought you to this sorry state?”This poor wretched geekthen started to speakand told me his terrible fate Cruel … Read more
It is a balmy summer evening in a suburb of Cambridge, England. Young gentlemen play cricket on the village green. Young ladies walk the country paths, shielded from the sun’s rays with fashionable parasols. An iced cream vendor perambulates the streets with a cheery smile. And a young couple sit before their computers, beating the … Read more
As an Englishman I’m well used to the experience of leaving some gloriously sun-kissed location and returning home to greyness and drizzle. But rarely the opposite. However, so it was on Friday as we swapped a sweltering, blue-skied London for the rain-drenched streets of Boston. Our hotel (the Onyx) is one of those seemingly ubiquitous … Read more
I was getting stuck into writing an article on interviews for IT jobs the other day. You know the sort of thing, what to wear, how to prepare your self, what to say when asked the typical questions, and the sort of questions to ask at the end. It then suddenly struck me that I … Read more
Tech Ed in Boston is just around the corner and the Red Gate offices are a feverish hive of activity (carefully coordinated around numerous swag boxes). I will be at the event, trying to dig out the latest news and views and hopefully, scratching a little beneath the shiny surface of the MS hype machine. … Read more
The server components of SQL Backup have now been compiled to run on 64-bit versions of SQL Server. The beta (which is feature complete) is public and can be downloaded from the Red Gate forums: http://www.red-gate.com/MessageBoard/viewforum.php?f=45. It’s also worth looking at if you have 32-bit servers too by the way, it’s the same download and install … Read more
There is a line in the book “London Fields” where the main character is asked why he only drinks lager when playing darts and not real ale. His answer is (I’m paraphrasing and omitting a lot of swear words — this is Martin Amis after all): “It’s kegged. You know what you are getting every … Read more
There are dangers to using the xp_sprintf system call in SQL Server 2000. Firstly, it has a 256 character limit, and secondly, it suffers from a buffer overflow bug in some versions which can cause all sorts of unpredicatable damage. it also provides a vulnerability in that an attacker can inject code which could gain … Read more
We’re a friendly bunch here at Red Gate – always looking to make new friends. Whilst it’s true that we dearly love sitting in front of our pooters and seeing who can grow the best chilli plants, sometimes we just want to get out, meet our users and have a jolly good gossip. We like … Read more
I’d like to squeeze in another reference to the Killing Game Show, or other Amiga classics, at this point. I really must wind up the emulator and dig out the ADFs I made of my old games, at some point. Sadly I lost the original machine when I sold a house, neglecting to clear out … Read more
Category: SQL Server development SQL Server versions: 2005 Level: Advanced SQL Server 2005 introduced support for .Net in SQL Server. While this is a very powerful feature, it does come with a high cost. The CLR support allows writing stored procedures, functions, triggers using programming languages like C#. It allows creating complicated user defined types, … Read more
Category: SQL Server developmentSQL Server versions: 7, 2000, 2005Level: Intermediate Naming stored procedures consistently is part of many organizational policies, still there are times when one needs to rename an already existing stored procedure. Seemingly the obvious way to rename a stored procedure would be the sp_rename system stored procedure readily supplied by SQL Server. … Read more
“Werry good poer o’ suction, Sammy,” said Mr Weller the elder, looking into the pot, when his first-born had set it down half empty. “You’d ha’ made an uncommon fine oyster, Sammy, if you’d been born in that station o’ life,”Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers One of the great pleasures of programming in a team … Read more
Slowly, all the necessary components are slotting into place to allow the developer to bypass the requirement to write traditional PC-based applications, or escape the tyranny of the all-encompassing n-tier distributed systems. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) seemed to appear out of nowhere around the start of 2005. XML is one of the few happy … Read more
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