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Wednesday, September 17, 2008 11:15 PM

Pond's Seventh Law Inspires a Question: Elegance Serving Randomness

Marc left a great question on a Pond's Laws post from July of 2006 : Hi, I have a flashcard system that randomly pulls a word from the database. I also have a testing module that allows a user to test him or her self on words. For each word the user answers
Posted by Ward Pond | 2 Comments
Tuesday, September 09, 2008 6:00 PM

Nullity: The Gift (of Nothingness) That Keeps On Giving

Almost three years after the post was originally published in October of 2005, Mark Johansen, author of A Sane Approach to Database Design (an approach I trust it's clear I favor) has left a terrific comment on the Do Not Fear NULLs article which is worthy
Posted by Ward Pond | 0 Comments
Thursday, June 26, 2008 5:30 PM

TOP, ORDER BY, and Non-Unique Columns

One of the comments I accidentally deleted earlier this afternoon posed the following question (paraphrased): I understand that TOP with ORDER BY makes no sense, but what about when I use different values for TOP and I ORDER BY a column that has duplicate
Posted by Ward Pond | 1 Comments
Friday, April 25, 2008 6:45 PM

Two Pieces of Technical News from Kalen

Kalen Delaney has one of the most consistently informative SQL Server blogs in all of the Internets, and unless I miss my guess, it was also she who left the first of the very supportive comments I've received in the wake of my recent series of personal
Posted by Ward Pond | 0 Comments
Friday, March 21, 2008 7:15 AM

Database Programming: The String Concatenation XML Trick, Finalized

It's an especially Good Friday when we can close the loop on a technical conversation, and I believe that our modifications to The Technique That Lance Found , also discussed here and here , are complete.  Scott Whigham left a comment on the most
Posted by Ward Pond | 2 Comments
Tuesday, March 18, 2008 5:15 PM

Database Programming: The String Concatenation XML Trick, Sans Entitization

When last we checked in on The Technique That Lance Found , Adam had noted that the method entitizes XML special characters, a state of affairs which limits its utility somewhat.  I tried to leverage Tony Rogerson's technique , which Adam passed
Posted by Ward Pond | 3 Comments
Saturday, March 15, 2008 12:30 AM

Database Programming: The String Concatenation XML Trick Revisited (Or, Adam Is Right, But We Can Fix It)

A find shared by one friend leads to correspondence from another.. The redoubtable Adam Machanic left a comment on The Technique That Lance Found which points out that special XML characters in a string will get entitized. As usual, Adam is correct. If
Posted by Ward Pond | 4 Comments
Thursday, March 13, 2008 12:00 PM

Database Programming: The String Concatenation XML Trick

Courtesy of my good friend and once-and-always colleague, Lance Larsen, who writes: I recently ran into this little trick. Joining two tables having a one-to-many relationship and stuffing a set of column values from the many side into a single column
Posted by Ward Pond | 4 Comments
Wednesday, February 20, 2008 9:15 PM

An Answer For Spazecaze: A Reasonable Method To Implement User Defined Fields

Spazecaze discovered a February, 2006 discussion of order of operations and poses the following question in its comment area : So how would you go about designing a database that allows for end user defined fields? For instance, a system is built to allow
Posted by Ward Pond | 0 Comments
Monday, November 05, 2007 2:30 PM

TechEd Developers 2007 Barcelona: Day 1

TechEd Developers 2007 got off to a roaring start today, as nearly 3000 attendees and presenters flocked to the Centre Convencions Internacional Barcelona for the event. Today’s keynote was delivered by S. Somasegar , Microsoft’s Corporate VP of the Developer
Posted by Ward Pond | 1 Comments
Tuesday, October 30, 2007 10:15 PM

Update/Clarification: I Might Start To, Like, Like LIKE..

.. but it's got to have a COLLATE with it. A couple of updates are necessary to my recent post on LIKE, PATINDEX, and COLLATE . A bit of this is covered in the comments to the original post, but I'd like to tie it all together and make sure that it's
Posted by Ward Pond | 1 Comments
Friday, October 26, 2007 10:45 PM

See You Even More In Barcelona: Two Additional Chalk Talk Sessions Added

I'm pleased to report that the organizers of TechEd have scheduled repeat offerings of two of my sessions (so much for my earlier belief that the schedule was finalized *grin*): Set-Based Thinking for the T-SQL Developer: Insights from Microsoft IT will
Posted by Ward Pond | 0 Comments
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 11:15 PM

See You In Barcelona: Schedule Finalized For TechEd Developers 2007 Chalk Talks

The PowerPoints are done. All of the demos save one are complete. A few days ago, the final pieces fell into place when the final schedule for TechEd Developers 2007. I'll be delivering the following "chalk talk" sessions: Set-Based Thinking for the T-SQL
Posted by Ward Pond | 1 Comments
Saturday, October 20, 2007 10:45 PM

Database Programming: Why I, Like, May Never Write Another LIKE, Like, Ever Again

[ UPDATE 30 October 2007 : There are significant ambiguities in this post which are addressed in the comments and in this follow-up , which I recommend reading after you've read this post and its comments. -wp] I've been doing some performance tuning
Posted by Ward Pond | 5 Comments
Saturday, October 20, 2007 9:30 PM

Lubor Offers a Wonderful Synopsis of Partitioning

One of the best parts of my current job is that the email distribution lists I'm on allow me to be a "fly on the wall" for some very interesting, educational conversations. Terry started this one off by asking a question: I’ve heard it recommended that
Posted by Ward Pond | 0 Comments
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