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• SQLAuthority News – #SQLPASS 2012 Schedule – Where can You Find Me

  - by pinaldave

  Yesterday I wrote about my memory lane with SQLPASS. It has been a fantastic experience and I am very confident that this year the same excellent experience is going to be repeated. Before I start for #SQLPASS every year, I plan where I want to be and what I will be doing. As I travel from India to attend this event (22+ hours flying time and door to door travel time around 36 hours), it is very crucial that I plan things in advance. This year here is my quick note where I will be during the SQLPASS event. If you can stop with me, I would like to meet you, shake your hand and will archive memories as a photograph. Tuesday, November 6, 2012 6:30pm-8:00pm PASS Summit 2012 Welcome Reception Wednesday, November 7, 2012 12pm-1pm – Book Signing at Exhibit Hall Joes Pros booth#117 (FREE BOOK) 5:30pm-6:30pm – Idera Reception at Fox Sports Grill 7pm-8pm - Embarcadero Booth Book Signing (FREE BOOK) 8pm onwards – Exhibitor Reception Thursday, November 8, 2012 12pm-1pm - Embarcadero Booth Book Signing (FREE BOOK) 7pm-10pm - Community Appreciation Party Friday, November 9, 2012 12pm-1pm - Joes 2 Pros Book Signing at Exhibit Hall Joes Pros booth#117 11:30pm-1pm - Birds of a Feather Luncheon Rest of the Time! Exhibition Hall Joes 2 Pros Booth #117. Stop by for the goodies! Lots of people have already sent me email asking if we can meet for a cup of coffee to discuss SQL. Absolutely! I like cafe mocha with skim milk and whip cream and I do not get tired of it. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL PASS, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – SELECT INTO with FileGroup or Partitionis Not Possible

  - by Pinal Dave

  The other day, I received an email from user and after a long time before I answer the question, I had to check the answer online. Here is the question - I want to create a new table based from old table, but when I execute following script it gives me an error. Is there anything I am missing in my syntax? SELECT *  INTO NewTableName ON MyFileGroup FROM MyOldTableName I faintly remember that this was not possible in earlier version of SQL Server but I was not sure if this feature was added in the recent versions or not. I quickly tried few syntaxes and referred online documentation and learned that it is still not possible in the latest version of SQL Server. The alternative is to just go ahead and change the default filegroup of any new table with following script. Though, I do not like change the default filegroup for new tables. It is possible that when I have changed the default filegroup some other code executes behind the scene by automated system or my colleague, it will be also created on new filegroup. ALTER DATABASE DatabaseName MODIFY FILEGROUP NameofFileGroup DEFAULT The reason this feature is not supported is that SELCT INTO is minimally logged operation. I seriously hope that some day in the future this feature get added in. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL Tagged: Filegroup

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• SQL SERVER – Storing Variable Values in Temporary Array or Temporary List

  - by pinaldave

  SQL Server does not support arrays or a dynamic length storage mechanism like list. Absolutely there are some clever workarounds and few extra-ordinary solutions but everybody can;t come up with such solution. Additionally, sometime the requirements are very simple that doing extraordinary coding is not required. Here is the simple case. Let us say here are the values: a, 10, 20, c, 30, d. Now the requirement is to store them in a array or list. It is very easy to do the same in C# or C. However, there is no quick way to do the same in SQL Server. Every single time when I get such requirement, I create a table variable and store the values in the table variables. Here is the example: For SQL Server 2012: DECLARE @ListofIDs TABLE(IDs VARCHAR(100)); INSERT INTO @ListofIDs VALUES('a'),('10'),('20'),('c'),('30'),('d'); SELECT IDs FROM @ListofIDs; GO When executed above script it will give following resultset. Above script will work in SQL Server 2012 only for SQL Server 2008 and earlier version run following code. DECLARE @ListofIDs TABLE(IDs VARCHAR(100), ID INT IDENTITY(1,1)); INSERT INTO @ListofIDs SELECT 'a' UNION ALL SELECT '10' UNION ALL SELECT '20' UNION ALL SELECT 'c' UNION ALL SELECT '30' UNION ALL SELECT 'd'; SELECT IDs FROM @ListofIDs; GO Now in this case, I have to convert numbers to varchars because I have to store mix datatypes in a single column. Additionally, this quick solution does not give any features of arrays (like inserting values in between as well accessing values using array index). Well, do you ever have to store temporary multiple values in SQL Server – if the count of values are dynamic and datatype is not specified early how will you about storing values which can be used later in the programming. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – Excel Losing Decimal Values When Value Pasted from SSMS ResultSet

  - by pinaldave

  No! It is not a SQL Server Issue or SSMS issue. It is how things work. There is a simple trick to resolve this issue. It is very common when users are coping the resultset to Excel, the floating point or decimals are missed. The solution is very much simple and it requires a small adjustment in the Excel. By default Excel is very smart and when it detects the value which is getting pasted is numeric it changes the column format to accommodate that. Now as Zero which are training any digit after decimal points have no value, Excel automatically hides it. To prevent this to happen user has to convert columns to text format so it can preserve the formatting. Here is how you can do it. Select the corner between A and 1 and Right Click on it. It will select complete spreadsheet. If you want to change the format of any column you can select an individual column the same way. In the menu Click on Format Cells… It will bring up the following menu. Here by default the selected column will be General, change that to Text. It will change the format of all the cells to Text. Now once again paste the values from SSMS to the Excel. This time it will preserve the decimal values from SSMS. Solved! Any other trick you do you know to preserve the decimal values? Leave a comment please. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Utility, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Excel

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• SQL SERVER – A Puzzle Part 2 – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value

  - by pinaldave

  Before continuing this blog post – please read the first part of the SEQUENCE Puzzle here A Puzzle – Fun with SEQUENCE in SQL Server 2012 – Guess the Next Value. Where we played a simple guessing game about predicting next value. The answers the of puzzle is shared on the blog posts as a comment. Now here is the next puzzle based on yesterday’s puzzle. First execute the script which I have written here. The only difference between yesterday’s script is that I have removed the MINVALUE as 1 from the syntax. Now guess what will be the next value as requested in the query. USE TempDB GO -- Create sequence CREATE SEQUENCE dbo.SequenceID AS BIGINT START WITH 3 INCREMENT BY 1 MAXVALUE 5 CYCLE NO CACHE; GO -- Following will return 3 SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Following will return 4 SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Following will return 5 SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Following will return which number SELECT next value FOR dbo.SequenceID; -- Clean up DROP SEQUENCE dbo.SequenceID; GO Above script gave me following resultset. 3 is the starting value and 5 is the maximum value. Once Sequence reaches to maximum value what happens? and WHY? I (kindly) suggest you try to attempt to answer this question without running this code in SQL Server 2012. I am very confident that irrespective of SQL Server version you are running you will have great learning. I will follow up of the answer in comments below. Recently my friend Vinod Kumar wrote excellent blog post on SQL Server 2012: Using SEQUENCE, you can head over there for learning sequence in details. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL – Download FREE Book – Data Access for HighlyScalable Solutions: Using SQL, NoSQL, and Polyglot Persistence

  - by Pinal Dave

  Recently I was preparing for Big Data and I ended up on very interesting read for everybody. This is created by Microsoft and it is indeed a fantastic read as per my opinion. It took me some time to read this entire book but it was worth reading this as it tried to answer two of the very interesting questions related to muscle. Here is the abstract from the book: Organizations seeking to use a NoSQL database are therefore faced with a twofold challenge: • Which NoSQL database(s) best meet(s) the needs of the organization? • How does an organization integrate a NoSQL database into its solutions? As I keep on reading the book, I find it very interesting and informative. I suggest if you have time this weekend, download the book and read it. This guide focuses on the most common types of NoSQL database currently available, describes the situations for which they are most suited, and shows examples of how you might incorporate them into a business application. The guide summarizes the experiences of a fictitious organization named Adventure Works, who implemented a solution that comprised an assortment of different databases. Download Data Access for HighlyScalable Solutions:  Using SQL, NoSQL,  and Polyglot Persistence While we are talking about Big Data and NoSQL do not forget to check out my tomorrow’s blog as I am going to talk about the same subject and it will be very interesting. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Big Data, NoSQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• SQL SERVER – Get Schema Name from Object ID using OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME

  - by pinaldave

  Sometime a simple solution have even simpler solutions but we often do not practice it as we do not see value in it or find it useful. Well, today’s blog post is also about something which I have seen not practiced much in codes. We are so much comfortable with alternative usage that we do not feel like switching how we query the data. I was going over forums and I noticed that at one place user has used following code to get Schema Name from ObjectID. USE AdventureWorks2012 GO SELECT s.name AS SchemaName, t.name AS TableName, s.schema_id, t.OBJECT_ID FROM sys.Tables t INNER JOIN sys.schemas s ON s.schema_id = t.schema_id WHERE t.name = OBJECT_NAME(46623209) GO Before I continue let me say I do not see anything wrong with this script. It is just fine and one of the way to get SchemaName from Object ID. However, I have been using function OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME to get the schema name. If I have to write the same code from the beginning I would have written the same code as following. SELECT OBJECT_SCHEMA_NAME(46623209) AS SchemaName, t.name AS TableName, t.schema_id, t.OBJECT_ID FROM sys.tables t WHERE t.name = OBJECT_NAME(46623209) GO Now, both of the above code give you exact same result. If you remove the WHERE condition it will give you information of all the tables of the database. Now the question is which one is better – honestly – it is not about one is better than other. Use the one which you prefer to use. I prefer to use second one as it requires less typing. Let me ask you the same question to you – which method to get schema name do yo use? and Why? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL System Table, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Top Fusion Apps User Experience Guidelines & Patterns That Every Apps Developer Should Know About

  - by ultan o'broin

  We've announced the availability of the Oracle Fusion Applications user experience design patterns. Developers can get going on these using the Design Filter Tool (or DeFT) to select the best pattern for their context of use. As you drill into the patterns you will discover more guidelines from the Applications User Experience team and some from the Rich Client User Interface team too that are also leveraged in Fusion Apps. All are based on the Oracle Application Development Framework components. To accelerate your Fusion apps development and tailoring, here's some inside insight into the really important patterns and guidelines that every apps developer needs to know about. They start at a broad Fusion Apps information architecture level and then become more granular at the page and task level. Information Architecture: These guidelines explain how the UI of an Oracle Fusion application is constructed. This enables you to understand where the changes that you want to make fit into the oveall application's information architecture. Begin with the UI Shell and Navigation guidelines, and then move onto page-level design using the Work Areas and Dashboards guidelines. UI Shell Guideline Navigation Guideline Introduction to Work Areas Guideline Dashboards Guideline Page Content: These patterns and guidelines cover the most common interactions used to complete tasks productively, beginning with the core interactions common across all pages, and then moving onto task-specific ones. Core Across All Pages Icons Guideline Page Actions Guideline Save Model Guideline Messages Pattern Set Embedded Help Pattern Set Task Dependent Add Existing Object Pattern Set Browse Pattern Set Create Pattern Set Detail on Demand Pattern Set Editing Objects Pattern Set Guided Processes Pattern Set Hierarchies Pattern Set Information Entry Forms Pattern Set Record Navigation Pattern Set Transactional Search and Results Pattern Group Now, armed with all this great insider information, get developing some great-looking, highly usable apps! Let me know in the comments how things go!

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• SQLAuthority News – Download Whitepaper – Power View Infrastructure Configuration and Installation: Step-by-Step and Scripts

  - by pinaldave

  Power View, a feature of SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition, is an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation experience. It provides intuitive ad-hoc reporting for business users such as data analysts, business decision makers, and information workers. Microsoft has recently released very interesting whitepaper which covers a sample scenario that validates the connectivity of the Power View reports to both PowerPivot workbooks and tabular models. This white paper talks about following important concepts about Power View: Understanding the hardware and software requirements and their download locations Installing and configuring the required infrastructure when Power View and its data models are on the same computer and on different computer Installing and configuring a computer used for client access to Power View reports, models, Sharepoint 2012 and Power View in a workgroup Configuring single sign-on access for double-hop scenarios with and without Kerberos You can download the whitepaper from here. This whitepaper talks about many interesting scenarios. It would be really interesting to know if you are using Power View in your production environment. If yes, would you please share your experience over here. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Download, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL White Papers, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL – What is the latest Version of NuoDB? – A Quick Contest to Get Amazon Gift Cards

  - by Pinal Dave

  We had a great contest earlier last week - What ACID stands in the Database? – Contest to Win 24 Amazon Gift Cards and Joes 2 Pros 2012 Kit. It has received quite a few responses. Just like any other contest, not everyone was winner. The kind folks at NuoDB decided to give another chance to everyone who have not won in the last contest. This means if you have missed to take part in the earlier contest or if you have taken part and not won, you still have one more chance to win Amazon Gift Card. Here is the quick contest: You just have to go and download NuoDB. The first 10 people who will download the NuoDB will get 10 – USD 10 cards. Remaining everyone will be entered into a lucky draw of Amazon Gift cards of USD 50. Winners will be announced in next 24 hours. Bonus Round: If you have entered in the contest above, you can also enter to win latest Beginning SSRS Joes 2 Pros book. You just have to leave a comment over here with your experience about your experience with NuoDB and what is the latest version of the product. Here are few of the blog post I wrote earlier on that subject: Part 1 – Install NuoDB in 90 Seconds Part 2 – Manage NuoDB Installation Part 3 – Explore NuoDB Database Part 4 – Migrate from SQL Server to NuoDB Part 5 - NuoDB and Third Party Explorer – SQuirreL SQL Client, SQL Workbench/J and DbVisualizer Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• MySQL – Introduction to CONCAT and CONCAT_WS functions

  - by Pinal Dave

  MySQL supports two types of concatenation functions. They are CONCAT and CONCAT_WS CONCAT function just concats all the argument values as such SELECT CONCAT('Television','Mobile','Furniture'); The above code returns the following TelevisionMobileFurniture If you want to concatenate them with a comma, either you need to specify the comma at the end of each value, or pass comma as an argument along with the values SELECT CONCAT('Television,','Mobile,','Furniture'); SELECT CONCAT('Television',',','Mobile',',','Furniture'); Both the above return the following Television,Mobile,Furniture However you can omit the extra work by using CONCAT_WS function. It stands for Concatenate with separator. This is very similar to CONCAT function, but accepts separator as the first argument. SELECT CONCAT_WS(',','Television','Mobile','Furniture'); The result is Television,Mobile,Furniture If you want pipeline as a separator, you can use SELECT CONCAT_WS('|','Television','Mobile','Furniture'); The result is Television|Mobile|Furniture So CONCAT_WS is very flexible in concatenating values along with separate. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• SQL SERVER – Caption the Cartoon Contest – Last 2 Days

  - by pinaldave

  Developer’s life is very interesting, we often want to start my day early at a job so we can go home early. However, the day never comes as the life of the developer is always about working late hours. If the developer goes to the office early – there are good chances that his co-workers will come late. Additionally, I am confident that there will be always something urgent for developers or DBA to solve right at the time they are ready to go home. This is the life of the developers!  Here is the interesting story of a DBA who was about to go to the home. He had to take his girlfriend to a movie and dinner in 30 minutes. However, his manager asks him to fix the performance related issues with their production server. In normal case, he had only two choices a) Job or b) Girlfriend. Well, our super hero DBA decided to use efficient tools and improve the performance of the production server in merely 30 minutes. When he was done, his manager was absolutely surprised by his efficiency and accuracy of the work. He asked him following question - Here is the contest – you need to guess what was the answer of our Super Hero DBA. If you guess the answer correct you may win Star Wars R2-D2 Inflatable Remote Controlled device. Additionally, if you Download DB Optimizer before Dec 8, 2012 – you will be eligible for USD 25 Amazon Gift Card (there are total 10 such awards). Please do not leave comments in this thread – to participate in the contest – please leave a comment here in the original contest page. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• SQL SERVER – Fix Visual Studio Error : Connections to SQL Server files (.mdf) require SQL Server Express 2005 to function properly. Please verify the installation of the component or download from the URL

  - by pinaldave

  In one of the virtual environment while I was trying to add SQL Server Database (.mdf) file to asp.net project I encountered following error: Connections to SQL Server files (.mdf) require SQL Server Express 2005 to function properly. Please verify the installation of the component or download from the URL:  For a long time I am using SQL Server 2012 but this error was a bit interesting to me. I realize that there should not be any need of the SQL Server 2005 installation. I quickly figured out that I can remove this error if I do as mentioned below: Open Microsoft Visual Studio Select Tools >> Options >> Database Tools >> Data Connections Enter the name of an installed instance in “SQL Server Instance Name” field. Click OK If you do not know the instance name, you can follow either of the options. 1) Use the command line sqlcmd utility 2) Using SQL Server Management Studio Is there any other way to resolve this error? Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: sqlcmd, Visual Studio

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• UK Pilot Event: Fusion Applications Release 8 Simplified UI: Extensibility & Customization of User Experience

  - by ultan o'broin

  Interested? Of course you are! But read on to understand the what, why, where, and the who and ensure this great opportunity is right for you before signing up. There will be some demand for this one, so hurry! What: A one-day workshop where Applications User Experience will preview the proposed content for communicating the user experience (UX) tool kit intended for the next release of Oracle Fusion Applications. We will walk through the content, explain our approach and tell you about our activities for communicating to partners and customers how to customize and extend their Release 8 user experiences for Oracle Fusion Applications with composers and the Oracle Application Development Framework Toolkit. When and Where: Dec. 11, 2013 @ Oracle UK in Thames Valley Park Again: This event is held in person in the UK. So ensure you can travel! Why: We are responding to Oracle partner interest about extending and customizing Simplified UIs for Release 7, and we will be use the upcoming release as our springboard for getting a powerful productivity and satisfaction message out to the Oracle ADF enterprise methodology development community, Fusion customer implementation and tailoring teams and to our Oracle partner ecosystem. This event will also be an opportunity for attendees to give Oracle feedback on the approach too, ensuring our messaging and resources meets your business needs or if there is something else needed to get up and running fast! Who: The ideal participants for this workshop are who will be involved in system implementation roles for HCM and CRM Oracle Fusion Applications Release 8, as well as seasoned ADF developers supporting Oracle Fusion Applications. And yes, Cloud is part of the agenda! How to Register: Use this URL: http://bit.ly/UXEXTUK13 If you have questions, then send them along right away to [email protected]. Deadline: Please RSVP by November 1, 2013.

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• My first time in the gambling industry

  - by sfrj

  I am a Java enterprise developer with almost 3 years of professional experience. Soon i am going to have a face to face interview with a company in the gambling industry. I already did successfully a phone screening and now for the personal interview i suppose they will ask me about some kind of white board problem or system design task. I think i am in the right place to ask about this, and would appreciate a lot if someone would give me some tips or share something related to his own experience. The things i am more interested in regarding my interview are: What are the most common challenges for programmers, in this industry? Any idea or suggestion on a white board problem they may ask me? Could you point me to some links where i can find information on the topic or sample problems in this industry?. I personally find this question very interesting not just for me. Also i think, the given answers can help also others in a similar situation. Just what i want to say whit this last comment is: Please avoid, answers like: www.google.com and so on...

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• SQL SERVER – FIX ERROR – Cannot connect to . Login failed. The login is from an untrusted domain and cannot be used with Windows authentication. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18452)

  - by pinaldave

  Just a day ago, I was doing small attempting to connect to my local SQL Server using IP 127.0.0.1. The IP is of my local machine and SQL Server is installed on the local box as well. However, whenever I try to connect to the server it gave me following strange error. Cannot connect to 127.0.0.1. Login failed. The login is from an untrusted domain and cannot be used with Windows authentication. (Microsoft SQL Server, Error: 18452) The reason was indeed strange as I was trying to connect from local box to local box and it said my login was from an untrusted domain. As my system is not part of any domain, this was really confusing to me. Another thing was that I have been always able to connect always using 127.0.0.1 to SQL Server and this was a bit strange to me. I started to think what did I change since it  last time I connected to SQL Server. Suddenly I remembered that I had modified my computer’s host file for some other purpose. Solution: I opened my host file and immediately added entry like 127.0.0.1 localhost. Once I added it I was able to reconnect to SQL Server as usual. The location of the host file is C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc. You will find file with the name hosts in it, make sure to open it with notepad. If you are part of a domain and your organization is using active directory, make sure that your account is added properly to active directory as well have proper security permissions to execute the task. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Error Messages, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• How can I get a user account back?

  - by Ilan

  With all my computers I make one partition for the root and another for /home. This is useful for disasters where I need to reformat the root for ubuntu, but leave my /home data untouched. With the upgrade to 13.10 I had troubles on my wife's computer so I reinstalled 13.10. My own /home files came up, as expected, as if nothing had happened. For my wife, it is a different story - and that is the part where I need help. If I go into Files, computer I can see the home directory. There I can see ilan (my files) and yona (my wife's files). I can open yona, documents and see all her work. This means that all is well and I just need to hook up to her files. So the problem is that I need to create a user called Yona or yona, but something which will get me to exactly the files of interest. I'm not sure if I created her account as standard or an administrator. Is there any way I could tell by looking at the files in /home? I created a new user called Yona as a standard user (hoping that this is the right guess). The account came up as disabled. I pressed on the disabled button so I could change the password. I put in her password but it was refused as too short. Too short, too short, but that is what was used and that is what I need. Can anyone help me before my wife comes home and shoots me? Thanks, Ilan

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• Differentiating between user script input formats

  - by KChaloux

  I have a .NET project at work that provides a couple of (Iron)Python scripts to the customers, to allow them to customize the output of the program. The application generates code for certain machines, and supports a couple of different formats. Until recently, we only provided a script for one format. We're expanding upon that to include support for the others. If the user is using a script, they select their input script before generating the output code. A script designed for Format1 output is going to cause errors if they're trying to generate Format2 output. I need to deal with this. One option would just be to let the customers use common sense, and if they load the wrong script it will just fail, or worse, produce inaccurate data. I'm inclined to provide a little more protection than that. At the moment I'm considering putting a shebang-style comment line at the top of the script, ala: # OUTPUT - Format1 If the user tries to run a Format2 process with a Format1 script, it will warn them. Alternatively I could create different file extensions for the input scripts that vary by type. The file-type comment approach helps prevent the script from actually loading improperly, at the cost of failing to warn the user until they've already selected it, via a dialog box. Using different file extensions would allow me to cut down on visual clutter when providing a File Dialog, but doesn't actually stop them from loading the wrong script. So I'm really not sure if the right approach is to just leave it alone, or provide some safeguards.

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• SSIS - Access Denied with UNC paths - The file name is a device or contains invalid characters

  - by simonsabin

  I spent another day tearing my hair out yesterday trying to resolve an issue with SSIS packages runnning in SQLAgent (not got much left at the moment, maybe I should contact the SSIS team for a wig). My situation was that I am deploying packages to a development server, and to provide isolation I was running jobs with a proxy account that only had access to the development servers. Proxies are an awesome feature and mean that you should never have to "just run the job as sysadmin". The issue I was facing was that the job step was failing. The job step was a simple execution of the package.The following errors appeared in my log file. I always check the "Log step output in history" for a job step, this ensures you get all the output from the command that you run. I'll blog about this later. If looking at the output in sysdtslog90 then you will have an entry with datacode -1073573533 and error message File or directory "<filename>" represented by connection "<connection>" does not exist.  Not exactly helpful. If you get the output from the console then you will also get these errors. 0xC0202070 "The file name property is not valid. The file name is a device or contains invalid characters." 0xC001401E "specified in the connection was not valid." It appears this error is due to the use of a UNC path and the account runnnig the package not having access to all the folders in the path. Solution To solve this you need to ensure that the proxy account has access to ALL folders in the path you are accessing. To check this works, logon as the relevant proxy user, or run a command window as the specified user. Then try and do net use \\server\share and then do a dir for each folder in the path and check you have access. If these work and you still have the problem then you have some other problem, sorry. The following are posts on experts exchange that also discuss this,http://www.experts-exchange.com/Microsoft/Development/MS-SQL-Server/SSIS/Q_24056047.htmlhttp://www.experts-exchange.com/Microsoft/Development/MS-SQL-Server/SSIS/Q_23968903.html This blog had a post about it being a 64 bit issue. That definitely wasn't the issue for me as I was on a 32 bit server http://blogs.perkinsconsulting.com/post/64-bit-SQL-Server-2005-SSIS-and-UNC-paths-Part-2.aspx  

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• BNF – how to read syntax?

  - by Piotr Rodak

  A few days ago I read post of Jen McCown (blog) about her idea of blogging about random articles from Books Online. I think this is a great idea, even if Jen says that it’s not exciting or sexy. I noticed that many of the questions that appear on forums and other media arise from pure fact that people asking questions didn’t bother to read and understand the manual – Books Online. Jen came up with a brilliant, concise acronym that describes very well the category of posts about Books Online – RTFM365. I take liberty of tagging this post with the same acronym. I often come across questions of type – ‘Hey, i am trying to create a table, but I am getting an error’. The error often says that the syntax is invalid. 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT DEFAULT Guid_Default NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); 5 The answer is usually(1), ‘Ok, let me check it out.. Ah yes – you have to put name of the DEFAULT constraint before the type of constraint: 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT Guid_Default DEFAULT NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); Why many people stumble on syntax errors? Is the syntax poorly documented? No, the issue is, that correct syntax of the CREATE TABLE statement is documented very well in Books Online and is.. intimidating. Many people can be taken aback by the rather complex block of code that describes all intricacies of the statement. However, I don’t know better way of defining syntax of the statement or command. The notation that is used to describe syntax in Books Online is a form of Backus-Naur notatiion, called BNF for short sometimes. This is a notation that was invented around 50 years ago, and some say that even earlier, around 400 BC – would you believe? Originally it was used to define syntax of, rather ancient now, ALGOL programming language (in 1950’s, not in ancient India). If you look closer at the definition of the BNF, it turns out that the principles of this syntax are pretty simple. Here are a few bullet points: italic_text is a placeholder for your identifier <italic_text_in_angle_brackets> is a definition which is described further. [everything in square brackets] is optional {everything in curly brackets} is obligatory everything | separated | by | operator is an alternative ::= “assigns” definition to an identifier Yes, it looks like these six simple points give you the key to understand even the most complicated syntax definitions in Books Online. Books Online contain an article about syntax conventions – have you ever read it? Let’s have a look at fragment of the CREATE TABLE statement: 1 CREATE TABLE 2 [ database_name . [ schema_name ] . | schema_name . ] table_name 3 ( { <column_definition> | <computed_column_definition> 4 | <column_set_definition> } 5 [ <table_constraint> ] [ ,...n ] ) 6 [ ON { partition_scheme_name ( partition_column_name ) | filegroup 7 | "default" } ] 8 [ { TEXTIMAGE_ON { filegroup | "default" } ] 9 [ FILESTREAM_ON { partition_scheme_name | filegroup 10 | "default" } ] 11 [ WITH ( <table_option> [ ,...n ] ) ] 12 [ ; ] Let’s look at line 2 of the above snippet: This line uses rules 3 and 5 from the list. So you know that you can create table which has specified one of the following. just name – table will be created in default user schema schema name and table name – table will be created in specified schema database name, schema name and table name – table will be created in specified database, in specified schema database name, .., table name – table will be created in specified database, in default schema of the user. Note that this single line of the notation describes each of the naming schemes in deterministic way. The ‘optionality’ of the schema_name element is nested within database_name.. section. You can use either database_name and optional schema name, or just schema name – this is specified by the pipe character ‘|’. The error that user gets with execution of the first script fragment in this post is as follows: Msg 156, Level 15, State 1, Line 2 Incorrect syntax near the keyword 'DEFAULT'. Ok, let’s have a look how to find out the correct syntax. Line number 3 of the BNF fragment above contains reference to <column_definition>. Since column_definition is in angle brackets, we know that this is a reference to notion described further in the code. And indeed, the very next fragment of BNF contains syntax of the column definition. 1 <column_definition> ::= 2 column_name <data_type> 3 [ FILESTREAM ] 4 [ COLLATE collation_name ] 5 [ NULL | NOT NULL ] 6 [ 7 [ CONSTRAINT constraint_name ] DEFAULT constant_expression ] 8 | [ IDENTITY [ ( seed ,increment ) ] [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ] 9 ] 10 [ ROWGUIDCOL ] [ <column_constraint> [ ...n ] ] 11 [ SPARSE ] Look at line 7 in the above fragment. It says, that the column can have a DEFAULT constraint which, if you want to name it, has to be prepended with [CONSTRAINT constraint_name] sequence. The name of the constraint is optional, but I strongly recommend you to make the effort of coming up with some meaningful name yourself. So the correct syntax of the CREATE TABLE statement from the beginning of the article is like this: 1 CREATE TABLE dbo.Employees 2 (guid uniqueidentifier CONSTRAINT Guid_Default DEFAULT NEWSEQUENTIALID() ROWGUIDCOL, 3 Employee_Name varchar(60) 4 CONSTRAINT Guid_PK PRIMARY KEY (guid) ); That is practically everything you should know about BNF. I encourage you to study the syntax definitions for various statements and commands in Books Online, you can find really interesting things hidden there. Technorati Tags: SQL Server,t-sql,BNF,syntax   (1) No, my answer usually is a question – ‘What error message? What does it say?’. You’d be surprised to know how many people think I can go through time and space and look at their screen at the moment they received the error.

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• MySQL – How to Find mysqld.exe with Command Prompt – Fix: ‘mysql’ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file

  - by Pinal Dave

  One of the most popular question I get after watching my MySQL courses on Pluralsight is that beginning users are not able to find where they have installed MySQL Server. The error they receive is as follows when they type mysqld command on their default command line. ‘mysql‘ is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. This error comes up if user try to execute mysqld command on default command prompt. The user should execute this command where mysql.exe file exists.  If you are using Windows Explorer you can easily search on your drive mysqld.exe and find the location of the file and execute the above command there. However, if you want to find out with command prompt the location of mysqld.exe file you can follow the direction here. Step 1: Open a command prompt Open command prompt from Start >> Run >> cmd >> enter Step 2: Change directory You need to change the default directory to root directory, hence type cd\ command on the prompt to change the default directory to c:\ . Here we are assuming that you have installed MySQL on your c: drive. If you have installed it on any other drive change the drive to that letter. Step 3: Search Drive Type the command dir mysqld.exe /s /p on the command prompt. It will search your directories and will list the directory where mysqld.exe is located. Step 4: Change Directory Now once again change your command prompt file location to the folder where your mysqld.exe is located. In my case it is located here in folder C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.6\bin hence I will run following command: cd C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.6\bin . Step 5: Execute mysqld.exe Now you can once again mysqld.exe on your command prompt. You can use this method to search pretty much any file with the help of command prompt. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com)Filed under: MySQL, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL

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• SQL SERVER – Step by Step Guide to Beginning Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012 – Introduction to DQS

  - by pinaldave

  Data Quality Services is a very important concept of SQL Server. I have recently started to explore the same and I am really learning some good concepts. Here are two very important blog posts which one should go over before continuing this blog post. Installing Data Quality Services (DQS) on SQL Server 2012 Connecting Error to Data Quality Services (DQS) on SQL Server 2012 This article is introduction to Data Quality Services for beginners. We will be using an Excel file Click on the image to enlarge the it. In the first article we learned to install DQS. In this article we will see how we can learn about building Knowledge Base and using it to help us identify the quality of the data as well help correct the bad quality of the data. Here are the two very important steps we will be learning in this tutorial. Building a New Knowledge Base  Creating a New Data Quality Project Let us start the building the Knowledge Base. Click on New Knowledge Base. In our project we will be using the Excel as a knowledge base. Here is the Excel which we will be using. There are two columns. One is Colors and another is Shade. They are independent columns and not related to each other. The point which I am trying to show is that in Column A there are unique data and in Column B there are duplicate records. Clicking on New Knowledge Base will bring up the following screen. Enter the name of the new knowledge base. Clicking NEXT will bring up following screen where it will allow to select the EXCE file and it will also let users select the source column. I have selected Colors and Shade both as a source column. Creating a domain is very important. Here you can create a unique domain or domain which is compositely build from Colors and Shade. As this is the first example, I will create unique domain – for Colors I will create domain Colors and for Shade I will create domain Shade. Here is the screen which will demonstrate how the screen will look after creating domains. Clicking NEXT it will bring you to following screen where you can do the data discovery. Clicking on the START will start the processing of the source data provided. Pre-processed data will show various information related to the source data. In our case it shows that Colors column have unique data whereas Shade have non-unique data and unique data rows are only two. In the next screen you can actually add more rows as well see the frequency of the data as the values are listed unique. Clicking next will publish the knowledge base which is just created. Now the knowledge base is created. We will try to take any random data and attempt to do DQS implementation over it. I am using another excel sheet here for simplicity purpose. In reality you can easily use SQL Server table for the same. Click on New Data Quality Project to see start DQS Project. In the next screen it will ask which knowledge base to use. We will be using our Colors knowledge base which we have recently created. In the Colors knowledge base we had two columns – 1) Colors and 2) Shade. In our case we will be using both of the mappings here. User can select one or multiple column mapping over here. Now the most important phase of the complete project. Click on Start and it will make the cleaning process and shows various results. In our case there were two columns to be processed and it completed the task with necessary information. It demonstrated that in Colors columns it has not corrected any value by itself but in Shade value there is a suggestion it has. We can train the DQS to correct values but let us keep that subject for future blog posts. Now click next and keep the domain Colors selected left side. It will demonstrate that there are two incorrect columns which it needs to be corrected. Here is the place where once corrected value will be auto-corrected in future. I manually corrected the value here and clicked on Approve radio buttons. As soon as I click on Approve buttons the rows will be disappeared from this tab and will move to Corrected Tab. If I had rejected tab it would have moved the rows to Invalid tab as well. In this screen you can see how the corrected 2 rows are demonstrated. You can click on Correct tab and see previously validated 6 rows which passed the DQS process. Now let us click on the Shade domain on the left side of the screen. This domain shows very interesting details as there DQS system guessed the correct answer as Dark with the confidence level of 77%. It is quite a high confidence level and manual observation also demonstrate that Dark is the correct answer. I clicked on Approve and the row moved to corrected tab. On the next screen DQS shows the summary of all the activities. It also demonstrates how the correction of the quality of the data was performed. The user can explore their data to a SQL Server Table, CSV file or Excel. The user also has an option to either explore data and all the associated cleansing info or data only. I will select Data only for demonstration purpose. Clicking explore will generate the files. Let us open the generated file. It will look as following and it looks pretty complete and corrected. Well, we have successfully completed DQS Process. The process is indeed very easy. I suggest you try this out yourself and you will find it very easy to learn. In future we will go over advanced concepts. Are you using this feature on your production server? If yes, would you please leave a comment with your environment and business need. It will be indeed interesting to see where it is implemented. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Data Quality Services, DQS

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• The penultimate audit trigger framework

  - by Piotr Rodak

  So, it’s time to see what I came up with after some time of playing with COLUMNS_UPDATED() and bitmasks. The first part of this miniseries describes the mechanics of the encoding which columns are updated within DML operation. The task I was faced with was to prepare an audit framework that will be fairly easy to use. The audited tables were to be the ones directly modified by user applications, not the ones heavily used by batch or ETL processes. The framework consists of several tables and procedures...(read more)

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• SQL Relay - G is for GO

  - by fatherjack

  At the SQL Relay event last week all the UK user group leaders did a combined session - The A to Z of SQL - where we all took two letters of the alphabet and gave a 2 minute (it was strictly timed) talk on something SQL related beginning with those letters. It was quite a riot working through 26 different talks in an hour with 25 speaker handovers and the associated switches between SSMS and the slide deck. As a speaker I thoroughly enjoyed it and i hoe we informed as much as  we entertained the...(read more)

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• Avoid SQL Injection with Parameters

  - by simonsabin

  The best way to avoid SQL Injection is with parameters. With parameters you can’t get SQL Injection. You only get SQL Injection where you are building a SQL statement by concatenating your parameter values in with your SQL statement. Annoyingly many TSQL statements don’t take parameters, CREATE DATABASE for instance, or really annoyingly ALTER USER. In these situations you have to rely on using QUOTENAME or REPLACE to avoid SQL Injection. (Kimberly Tripp takes about this in her recent blog post Little...(read more)

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