Dimensional Modeling 101 - Time vs Date

When most DW designers begin developing a data warehouse, the Time dimension is the first dimension reviewed with the users. There are usually two or three different persectives on what the Time dimension should represent but, for the most part, it will be used for such calculations as Year-to-date Sales, Monthly Inventory Churn, etc. What most users are actually describing is a Date, or Calendar dimension.

Debugging in Visual Studio.NET 2005

Debugging is an important process for any level of programming to ensure programs function as expected. Most productive developer environments provide tools and utilities to assist with the debugging process. Visual Studio.NET 2005 is equipped with a number of debugger visualizers, but users can also create their own based on an individual project.

Stored procedure: Search character columns for a given string

This tip continues the system stored procedure series with a routine to find occurrences of a string in the character columns of selected tables.

Minimizing the need to restore a backup

The second installment of this series discussed the cost of maintaining systems with various levels of downtime, ways data can be lost, and what constitutes a backup. In this installment, I discuss how to configure your hardware to minimize the need to restore a backup.

Two True Calendar

two True Calendar

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.

"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.

Function to parse a delimited string

This UDF takes a delimited string and parses it into "words" which are returned as rows in a table. The table returned indicates the position of each element in the source string, and converts values to integer and numeric formats if possible.The script contains examples on how to use the function.the original version was written […]

A Call to Arms

Long anticipated, the arrival of radically restructured database architectures is now finally at hand.

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.