Entries for January 2009

It seems that every client project I have started in recent months has involved a new form of complexity in SQL Server scripts.  The most recent task that I had to tackle was with generating a comma separated list based on entries in a table.  Now this was something that I needed for each and every row of a result set, so I didn't want to do the actual list creation in .NET.  So, reaching back to some content and examples that I built for my "Creating Dynamic SQL Pivots" article which will be published in an upcoming edition of SQL Server I found the following helpful snippet of code.

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One of the biggest failure points I see with third-party DotNetNuke modules, including some of my first released modules were failures due to the lack of support for ObjectQualifier or DatabaseOwner values within the SqlDataProvider files.  Although the process to add support for these two tokens is easy to add, it is very hard for those of us that like to test our database structures outside of DotNetNuke before we actually commit to building our modules.  Thankfully, with a bit of research, I have found a way to build SQL Scripts for DotNetNuke using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) in a normal fashion and using a simple find/replace operation to bring everything into compliance with DotNetNuke integration.  This post will explore the method that I use to accomplish this.

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While working through some issues recently with some legacy code writen by someone else I was faced with a horrible case of a shared object that was writing to the file.  This was a "custom" logging implementation and opened a file for append, inserted the line, and then closed the file.  Well in times of heavy load the system would encounter errors such as "Cannot access ___ because it is being used by another process".  So in effect the file was either still open, or the lock was not yet released.  This post goes through a bit of the detail on how I resolved the issue.

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As I am getting things in place for 2009 I wanted to post a quick update here on the blog about a few new exciting things that I am working on and to notify everyone of a new service offering that IowaComputerGurus is starting today. Book Announcement The biggest news of all is that I have another book writing deal with Wrox Press.  I h...

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Due to many reported issues with blog email notifications not being sent I have created an new Email Subscription service.  Users will need to use the new Subscription Form, to re-subscribe to e-mail notifications.  For the next 1-2 weeks this will be an instant notification, but will migrate to a weekly service. Please let me know if yo...

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One very common scenario in when working with User Interface database queries is the concept of a "Dynamic Search Query". A select statement that can have optional items in the where clause. There are a number of methods to implement this, however, they have varying levels of difficulty and, overall each have their own tradeoffs, in implementation, readability, performance, and accuracy. This article explores a few of the most common methods of doing this.

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