In this article, we will be discussing about manipulating EXCEL 97-2003 worksheets with the OPENROWSET command. About the OPENROWSET Command SQL Server provides among other the neat feature of the OPENROWSET command. OPENROWSET allows establishing ad hoc connections using OLE DB. It actually allows one-time access to remote data from an OLE DB data source. If … Read more…
In this article, we will be discussing about the “A transport-level error has occurred when sending the request to the server” error message, you might get in SQL Server. This article’s purpose is to explain the above connectivity error and ways of resolving it. Why you might get the “transport-level” error in SQL Server … Read more…
Today we had our company presentation regarding the financial results of the year 2008. One of the sessions of this meeting were the Employee Awards for 2008. To my pleasant surprise I have received the Leadership Award for the year 2008 “in recognition of accomplishments far exceeding company expectations” and for gaining and applying technical … Read more…
In this article, we will be discussing about the “Divide by zero error encountered” error message in SQL Server. About the “Divide by zero error encountered” error message Well, as the error message says, whenever we have a division within a SQL query and the denominator has the value of zero (0) we get this … Read more…
Well, another successful event took place yesterday in another one of our regular community events of the Cyprus .NET User Group. About the Event This time the topic was ASP .NET AJAX. Our special guest speaker was Karl Davies-Barrett, Developer Platform Evangelist (Microsoft Malta/Cyprus). AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It allows the … Read more…
There are many times were we need to handle NULL and “empty” values in SQL Server. Note however, that there is a difference between a NULL and an “empty” value. In this example we will examine the above cases and ways of handling it, when developing data processes in SQL Server. Create a Sample … Read more…
There are many times where a query may result to the following error: String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been terminated. We will go through a simple example for explaining this behavior. Reproducing the “String or binary data would be truncated” error Creating the Sample Table Consider the following table: CREATE TABLE … Read more…
I was recently asked by a friend, how can we control the level of locking in SQL Server when executing SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT and DELETE statements. The answer to this question is by using locking hints. Locking hints direct SQL Server to the type of locks to be used. Even though the SQL Server Query … Read more…
There are cases where a SQL Server database developer might get an error message similar to: “The multi part identifier could not be bound“. This happens because of the way the database developer handles table scopes within the query. Read the article below, in order to better understand this error, and see how easy is … Read more…
This short post, discusses about SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack, what it is and what functionality it offers. SQL Server 2008 is undoubtedly an extremely powerful Relational Database Management System. It comes with many new features that increase the database developer’s productivity and make the life of the DBA easier. In September 2008, Microsoft has published … Read more…
In this article, we provide a list of commonly used string functions in SQL Server. By combining these functions, it is possible to easily manipulate strings. For each function, we provide useful examples, that can help you better understand these functions’ usage. REPLICATE This function given a string and an integer N, it repeats … Read more…
This article, discusses about the SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration Tool. What is SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration Tool? An important security improvement in Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is that various of its features that could be potentially susceptible to security risks are turned off by default. One of these features is … Read more…
At some time today, I had to compare the indices of various database tables. To this end, I needed a fast way of getting index information for specific tables. In SQL Server, there is a system stored procedure (stored in the master database) called sp_helpindex. The syntax for using it is the following: EXEC sp_helpindex … Read more…
Last night I installed Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2. Though, during the configuration process of BizTalk, I was prompt that SQL Server 2005 Service Packs were not detected. At that time I though to myself; how do I find if any, and which Service Pack is installed for SQL Server? By reading the Microsoft Help … Read more…
Hi friends, this article discusses the “Backup Compression” feature in SQL Server. About Backup Compression in SQL Server How many times have we backed up a database and then we have tried to minimize the size of the backup set by compressing it with an archiving utility? I am quite sure that such cases … Read more…