Chess makes a fantastic game for programming examples. You will find hundreds of examples on the internet. Some dedicated to OO patterns, others to algorithms and so forth. Unfortunately, most of these examples do not use a database or if they do, treat the database as nothing more than a storage repository. In this series of articles we will use SQL Server and T-SQL to implement the game of chess with an emphasis on thinking in sets.
Robyn Page and Phil Factor take on GROUP BY queries in SQL server, starting on the nursery slopes but finishing with a wild ride off-piste.
Maintenance Plan Designer gives you access to 11 tasks, which allow you to perform a variety of database management activities. This article provides a brief overview of each of them, focusing on their recent improvements.
Sql Server comes with a host of built in functions such as ISNULL, CONVERT and CAST. Now if that wasn't enough rope to hang ourselves with, as of Sql Server 2000 we gained the ability to create our own user defined functions. In this article I will be looking at the three main date functions DATEADD, DATEPART and DATEDIFF (there is a fourth called DATENAME but I want to get to the end of this article before you fall asleep so I decided to leave it for another date and time! And no it doesn't foretell the name of your future blind date so it's not as interesting as it sounds anyway) Then I will be combining all three in a user defined function of our own by which time our necks will be well and truly stretched
An updated version of xp_sql2exchange is now available, enabling you to publish SQL Server data easily to an exchange server. Read about this very cool extended stored procedure from author Steve Boriotti.
Michael M. David returns to SQLSummit.com to explore two approaches to XML hierarchical structure transformations. He explains the difference between restructuring and reshaping XML data, with the latter driven by the semantics of the data structure.
Phil Factor's describes his first encounter with the "light arms" (low calibre, small bore, needed to be fired).
Steve Jones is in Seattle for the first Microsoft BI Conference and offers some thoughts on the event.
his article will explore various methods of accessing SQL Server from inside Microsoft Expression Web. Microsoft Expression Web is a graphical development tool for creating web pages and is part of the new Expression Studio.
The .NET Framework 2.0 introduces a very handy new class in the System.Data.SqlClient namespace called SqlBulkCopy that makes it very easy and efficient to copy large amounts of data from your .NET applications to a SQL Server database. You can even use this class to write a short .NET application that can serve as a "middleman" to move data between database servers.
By Steve Jones
I’ve often done some analysis of my year in different ways. Last year I...
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