May 2008 Entries

Natural Key vs. Surrogate Key - Userid in Social Networks

All of us (almost) are the members of different social networks: Facebook, Bebo, Myspace, Hi5, etc. We ARE users. User is a real entity - a real person. One of the problems is the ability to identify a user in a unique way across the internet. There are 2 approaches to identify entity [ ... ]

posted @ Friday, May 30, 2008 1:36 PM | Your thoughts

MySql: Add a Column at a Specific Position

I'm playing with MySql for the 1st time in my life recently. Rather quickly I'm getting used to it mostly due to my experience with MSSQL as DBA. While changing table structure [ ... ]

posted @ Wednesday, May 28, 2008 7:17 PM | Your thoughts

MSSQL 2008: Spatial Data Types - Geography and Geometry

In addition to new DATETIME data types introduced in MSSQL 2008 there are geography and geometry data types introduced - useful for storing and manipulating geodetic data. Geometry data type is used to store flat map data like points, lines, and shapes [ ... ]

posted @ Thursday, May 15, 2008 2:28 AM | Your thoughts

MSSQL 2008: What is DATETIME2

MSSQL 2008 introduces several new DATETIME datatypes for T-SQL: TIME, DATE, DATETIME2, DATETIMEOFFSET. It is obvious that TIME and DATE provide the ability to store separately DATE and TIME parts of DATETIME. It was not possible to do in previous versions of MSSQL, however [ ... ]

posted @ Tuesday, May 13, 2008 7:13 PM | Your thoughts

T-SQL: LIKE Operator and Wildcard Characters

An interesting issue I came into recently. Suppose you have a search procedure - which consists of some SELECT query which gets a query phrase as a parameter and searches through a table coulumn using LIKE [ ... ]

posted @ Thursday, May 8, 2008 2:37 AM | Your thoughts

MSSQL: Search and Replace in a TEXT(NTEXT) column

Sometimes we need to search and replace a text value in the entire table. The column in question is of TEXT or NTEXT datatype. T-SQL REPLACE function does not work with TEXT/NTEXT datatype. Instead we have to use several other functions [ ... ]

posted @ Saturday, May 3, 2008 8:16 PM | Your thoughts

Facebook's Standard Security Settings Sufficient ? (Not)

BBC came out with an article today Identity 'at risk' on Facebook which discusses potential stealing of user data by 3rd parties applications of Facebook Development Platform: When you add an application [ ... ]

posted @ Friday, May 2, 2008 4:43 AM | Your thoughts