Donny Mack

Posted @: Paul Laudeman's Blog

Microsoft PDC 2003 full content now available

Microsoft has made the PDC 2003 seessions (audio/video/powerpoints) available online for your viewing pleasure (via Duncan Mackenzie). If you missed the PDC, be sure to check these out!

http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC2003/Default.htm

Originally Posted By JosephCooney Here

I've read a couple of arguments for and against stored procedures vs. dynamic SQL.

http://weblogs.asp.net/rhoward/posts/38095.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/fbouma/posts/38178.aspx

http://weblogs.asp.net/RHoward/posts/38298.aspx

http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/seichert/posts/3698.aspx

Here is my take.

Stored procedures are your methods against the "database" object. You write stored procedures for all the same reasons you add methods to objects (rather than manipulating the object internals themselves). If you want to change some aspect of the internals of the database, the only place you have to look to see what impact this will have is in your stored procedures. It gives you encapsulation and abstraction. Simple CReate-Update-Delete statements are generated for you. Wrapper classes for your stored procedures are generated. When you write a new procedure you re-generate your data tier. The only place where stored procedures fall down a little is writing performant ones that allow you to search tables on a large number of criteria, however there are code generation ways around this too. As I said in my comments on Rob Howard's orriginal post I love stored procedures and couldn't really imagine writing database driven apps without them, so I might be biased. 

originally posted by: Ken Brubaker here
 

Originally Published on Doug Seven's Blog

SQL WebBench is a stand alone browser based application that demonstrates Native SQL Web Services in Microsoft® SQL Server™ Yukon Beta 1. SQL Web Bench allows for HTTP SOAP endpoint manipulation and the ability to invoke remote SQL web services right from your browser via a WSDL XSL transform. SQL Web Bench demonstrates and exposes the raw SOAP that is sent and received from the server.

This article describes how to implement a callback function during the installation of the SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (MSDE 2000) and also discusses all the conditions that must be met to make sure the callback function runs properly.

The guy is just brilliant so I had to spread the knowledge

Great Presentations on many different cutting edge topics::http://research.microsoft.com/users/gray/jimgraytalks.htm

BIO

Jim Gray is a "Distinguished Engineer" in
Microsoft's Scaleable Servers Research Group
and manager of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center (BARC).

Jim's primary research interests are in databases and transaction processing systems. His current work focuses on building supercomputers with commodity components, thereby reducing the cost of storage, processing, and networking by factors of 10x to 1000x over low-volume solutions. This includes work on building fast networks, on building huge web servers with CyberBricks, and building very inexpensive and very high-performance storage servers.

Jim also is working with the astronomy community to build the world-wide telescope . When all the world's astronomy data is on the Internet and is accessible as a single distributed database, the Internet will be the world's best telescope. This is part of the larger agenda of getting all information online and easily accessible (digital libraries, digital government, online science, ...).

Originally posted by Vasanth Dharmaraj

Back in 1998 Microsoft made a big splash about the TerraServer - one of the first terabyte databases to be made available on the web. Now, a terabyte of storage can be purchased for £1000. Now Jim Gray (one of the founding fathers of modern database theory and Turing Award winner) and his research colleagues have been working on SkyServer, like TerraServer but looking the other way. http://skyserver.sdss.org. This is a digital sky survey of the northern 1/3rd of the universe, covering 10TB of pictures plus 1TB of catalog information and containing a total of 3 billion records inside a SQL Server database. http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/tools/chart/navi.asp shows an XML web service for accessing this information. You can even query the database using T-SQL here (http://skyserver.sdss.org/dr1/en/tools/chart/list.asp).

We've also built a virtual observatory at http://skyquery.net. This is a federated database that combines databases from about 10 separate observatories. This enables you to treat all these observatories as if they were just one giant database. Everything here is in the public domain: http://www.skyserver.org has everything you need to build your own Sky Server! The code itself is written in C# and ASP.NET.

Rare is the OLAP cube that does not include a so-called Time dimension – a dimension that allows data to be analyzed over time. Though often named simply “Time”, the typical Time dimension is actually a date dimension, with a hierarchy consisting of Year-Quarter-Month-Day or the like.

By Tom Chester